Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

Emerson somewhere describes a very shy man to whom it was always a pain that he must at any given moment be somewhere, but who was comforted by the thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. The present habit of the newspapers deprives us of all that innocent pleasure, since they may at any moment assign to us all these innumerable places at the same time. Cicero, who rejoiced that he was at a certain time so unimportant that he could mount his horse and ride a few miles out of Rome without anybody's noticing it, would lose all that privilege were he among us, for he would very likely be reported as on horseback, whether he was there or not. In one way this fictitious publicity, or publicity under fictitious circumstances, has its advantages, for if the newspapers sometimes report you to be where you would not have thought of going, they often do you the favor of recording you as present at some public function — a funeral, for instance --where you ought to be but are not. The friend already quoted tells me that this has