Time & Perspective Quote by Washington Irving

Celebrity is a churn, and Irving clocks it with the calm menace of someone watching a culture forget itself in real time. “Idol” isn’t accidental: it’s worship language, suggesting a public that doesn’t merely admire but submits. The verb “pushes” makes fame physical and slightly brutish, as if memory were a crowded room where the newest figure elbows the last one into the dark. What looks like a mild observation turns into a critique of attention as a zero-sum economy.

Irving’s real target is the fragility of “recollection” in a society accelerating toward novelty. The line stages time as a conveyor belt: today, yesterday, tomorrow. No hero is stable; each is just a placeholder until the next name arrives. That’s why “will, in turn” lands with quiet fatalism. Even the current idol’s reign is already written in past tense. The prestige of the present contains its own expiration date.

Context matters. Writing in the early American republic, Irving lived through a moment when print culture, partisan newspapers, and a growing marketplace for personalities were reshaping public life. “Hero” carries the older idea of civic virtue and historical remembrance; “idol” hints at the newer, more consumerist appetite for figures who can be rapidly manufactured, circulated, and replaced. The subtext is a warning: when a culture trades heroes for idols, it doesn’t just change who it honors; it changes what it’s capable of remembering. Fame becomes less a reward for consequence than a symptom of trend.