Time & Perspective Quote by E. B. White

Optimism, in E. B. White's hands, isn’t a sunny temperament; it’s a moral wager with a sharp condition attached. He frames “a bright future for man” as something easily forfeited by a particular modern obsession: the compulsion to “outwit Nature.” That verb is telling. It implies not stewardship or curiosity but a smug, competitive posture, as if the natural world were an opponent to be embarrassed rather than a system to be understood. White isn’t rejecting science so much as puncturing a cultural swagger that treats technological cleverness as identical to wisdom.

The counterweight he offers is sensuous and disarmingly domestic: “tasting her sweetness.” It’s a phrase that pulls environmental ethics out of policy-speak and back into the body. Nature isn’t an abstraction to be “saved” in the future; it’s something you encounter now, through attention, pleasure, and gratitude. White’s subtext is that alienation is the precondition for exploitation: you only bulldoze what you’ve stopped noticing.

Then comes the line’s quiet hammer: “respecting her seniority.” It’s anthropomorphic, even old-fashioned, and that’s the point. By casting Nature as elder, White taps an etiquette most people understand instinctively: you don’t lecture your grandparents about how the world works. The irony is that modernity prides itself on novelty while depending entirely on ancient systems it didn’t build and can’t renegotiate. White’s intent is less to scold than to reframe progress as humility: a future worth having requires reverence, not just invention.