Parenting & Family Quote by E. B. White

White is diagnosing a modern ache that feels almost quaint until you notice how contemporary it still is: the shift from lived life to mediated life. The sentence turns on a contrast in posture. As a child, people "looked about them" - eyes-level, local, embodied - and their happiness is tellingly modest, "moderately" so. Then the present tense arrives like a bad invention: they "peer beyond the seven seas", a phrase that sounds adventurous but lands as compulsive. Curiosity becomes surveillance.

The real barb is in the physicality. White doesn't say they read the news; they "bury themselves waist deep in tidings". Tidings are old-fashioned, almost biblical, yet the image is of drowning in updates. "Waist deep" implies you could still step out, but you don't. The sadness isn't framed as a tragedy visited upon them; it's the predictable consequence of self-submersion. White's tone is mild, not hysterical, which makes the indictment sharper: he doesn't need to exaggerate because the behavior is already absurd.

Context matters. White wrote through two World Wars and into the era of mass-circulation newspapers, radio, and the early TV age - the point when "the world" became a daily household presence. The subtext is not anti-knowledge but anti-compulsion: a warning that informational reach can outstrip emotional capacity. He spots the psychological trick modern media plays: it expands your sense of responsibility without expanding your power, leaving you informed, helpless, and therefore "unutterably sad."