"Maturity is moving from the close-up to the landscape, focusing less on your own supposed strengths and weaknesses and more on the sea of empathy in which you swim, which is the medium necessary for understanding others, one’s self, and survival."

David Brooks attempts an aphorism, ending a column aimed at distinguishing between introspection and narcissism.

Style point: Shouldn't it be seascape?

In October 1880, the New York Times published an article on the word "seascape":

The propriety of this word seems more doubtful if it be borne in mind that landscape seems to run parallel with German landschaft, the primary meaning of which is the circuit of a state, and a secondary one the impression created by nature within such circuit or region on the mind (and, of course, eye) of a spectator, and then its scientific representation by the pencil or brush. Now, it need hardly be said that -schaft has no immediate connection with the root -scep, to see, but with shaffen, to make, and corresponds with our -ship, as in freundschaft, friendship. But this -ship was an Anglo-Saxon or First English -scipe, and belongs to the verbs scapan, sceapan, or scyppan, to form or shape. Our landscape, too, was often written landskip, but whether this is the older form or not I have no materials to prove. It may be a descendant or the above-mentioned scyppan or scipan. Landscipe appears in Bosworth, but not sœscipe, as the sea was probably never regarded as possessing natural lines and boundaries. Landscape is, therefore, not properly a region which the eye beholds or contemplates as a view; and if seascape be regarded as a water view, it is suggestive of a false etymology.