Time & Perspective Quote by Gay Talese

Talese is making a power grab on behalf of reportage: not just to inform you about what happened, but to stage-manage your attention the way a novelist does. The repetition of “place and time and the time and place” isn’t clumsy; it’s incantatory, a kind of oath that the facts alone aren’t the point. The point is lived experience rendered with enough sensory and social texture that the reader stops hovering above the story and starts walking inside it.

His key verb is “move.” He’s not describing characters from a lectern; he’s shadowing them, pacing their days, letting geography and routine do narrative work. That’s the New Journalism wager Talese helped define in the 1960s and 70s: that scene, dialogue, and close observation can reveal power, class, desire, and self-deception more sharply than a stack of quotes and a neat nut graf. The subtext is a quiet argument against the supposed neutrality of traditional news writing. “Objectivity” can become a style that keeps people at arm’s length; Talese wants intimacy, even immersion.

There’s also an ethical tremor under the craft talk. To “move with” real people is to claim access to their private rhythms, then translate them for strangers. Talese’s ideal is fidelity to the world “in which they are living,” but the sentence betrays how much authorial choreography that requires. He’s telling you, plainly, that reality doesn’t arrive as narrative. A journalist has to build the room before you can watch anyone breathe in it.