“Where is Earth?”: Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and William Blake’s The Four Zoas

Pause, then; and, for a Moment, here respire.— If human Thought can keep its Station Here: Where am I?—Where is Earth?— Edward Young, The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality On several occasions in his nine-book poem The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (published in series between 1742 and 1746), Edward Young imagines viewing the terrestrial globe from afar. The poem comprises a series of desultory musings on death, morality, and Christianity, apparently occasioned by the deaths of three of Young’s loved ones. Young’s frequent projections of global vision hinge on a cognitive leap brought about by a shift in spatial scale, as the poem’s speaker courts an abstract “view from nowhere” from which to reappraise the condition of earthly existence. The phrase “view from nowhere” was coined by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential book by this name. Nagel’s book concerns itself with “a single” and familiar “problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world, the person and his viewpoint included.” For Nagel, the adoption of the view from nowhere can facilitate a progressive movement toward objectivity “that leaves the personal or merely human perspective further and further behind”; yet, Nagel goes on, “if what we want is to understand the whole world, we can’t forget about those subjective starting points indefinitely.” I find this model of toggling between completism and the “subjective standpoint” to be eminently applicable to what I call the global poetics of Edward Young. For Young, the view from nowhere frequently crystallizes on the image of the terrestrial globe. Despite the abstract nature of this mental picture, Young’s globes are often invested with a profound affective heft, such that this abstraction is inseparable from the poem’s effusions of grief and despair, as well as its eventual flashes of religious consolation.