Time & Perspective Quote by Jones Very

Very draws a hard line between the headline and the hidden engine. “External history” is the parade of events we can catalog: wars, elections, inventions, scandals, the bright objects that grab attention and seem to steer the age. He grants their power to “give a new direction to the current,” but he refuses to confuse the river’s bends with the source of its motion. The quiet provocation is that what looks like causation is often just scenery.

As a 19th-century American poet with a distinctly inward, quasi-mystical strain, Very is pushing back against the era’s growing confidence in chronologies and “great man” explanations. His syntax does the work: “indeed prominent” concedes the obvious, then the sentence pivots on “but,” collapsing the illusion that prominence equals meaning. The river metaphor is strategic because it flatters the historian’s impulse to map while reminding us mapping is not explanation. You can draw the channel perfectly and still not account for why water keeps moving.

The subtext is almost theological: beneath public events lies a deeper force - conscience, spirit, human longing, some persistent moral or metaphysical pressure - that “will ever flow” whether or not the world provides a dramatic plot twist. In an American culture increasingly enamored of progress narratives, Very’s line reads like a corrective: don’t confuse novelty with necessity. External history may redirect us, even jolt us, but it rarely answers the harder question of what compels societies to keep becoming themselves.