E.B. White Mocking Gossip Writers on Their Lazy Use of Language: “On a fetid afternoon like this, when all the nobility goes out of a writer and parts of speech lie scattered around the room among cigarette butts and crushed paper cups, we envy the gossip columnists their lot.” (From his essay “No Verbs”)
E.B. White on Raising Chickens: “I sometimes think I am crazy —everybody else fighting and dying or working for a cause or writing to his senator, and me looking after some Barred Rock chickens. But the land, and the creatures that go with it, are what is left that is good, and they are the authors of the book that I find worth reading…” (From his essay ‘Spring’)
E.B. White on a Red Barn Casting Blue Shadows: “I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.” (From his essay “Winter Diary”)
E.B. White on Being Fully Awake: “Once in everyone’s life, there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half-asleep.”
E.B. White on Complications: “There’s no limit to how complicated things can get on account of things leading to another.” (From Charlotte’s Web)
E.B. White on Educators: “We need educators who believe that character is more precious than special knowledge, that vision is not just something arrived at through a well-ground lens, and that a child is the most hopeful (and historically the most neglected) property the Republic boasts.”
E.B. White on Estimating a Writer’s Time: “…there is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.” (From his essay “Security”)
E.B. White on Farmers: From his essay called Book Learning: While farmers of course have an interest “in science, modern methods, and in theory…” they “maintain a healthy suspicion of book learning…”
As they should. It’s smart to always be skeptical. Especially when science and practicality often don’t mesh. Academics often can’t make up their minds and most don’t have real life farming experience. You have to go with what works, especially when it’s your livelihood.
E.B. White on Fashion, Literally and Figuratively: “I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people have recut their clothes to follow the fashion. On my last trip, however, it seemed to me that people had remodeled their ideas too, taken in their convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history. It seemed to me they had strung along with Paris a little too long.” (From his essay “Freedom”)
E.B. White on Ferris Wheels: “It pays to check up on Ferris wheels these days: by noting the volume of business one can get some idea which side is ahead in the world — whether the airborne free-men outnumber the earthbound slaves.” (From his essay “Security”)
E.B. White on Freedom: “Freedom is a household word now, but it’s only once in a while that you see a man who is actively, almost belligerently free.” (Referring to his lobstering friend Dameron in his essay “Second World War”)
E.B. White on Freedom, also: “My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.” (From his essay “Freedom”)
E.B. White on Genius: “Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than a whole one.” (From his essay “Lime”)
E.B. White on How to Know the Shape of Things: “The way to know the shape of things in advance is to listen to seers and mystics instead of to economists and tacticians.”
E.B. White on Kids Becoming Bussed to a Consolidated School: “As for me, although I am motorized to a degree, I enjoy living among pedestrians who have an instinctive and habitual realization that there is more to a journey than the mere fact of arrival. If the consolidated school served by buses destroys that in our children I don’t know that we are ahead of the game after all.”
E.B. White on Leaving His Full Time Job at the New Yorker: “If I was disenchanted at all, I was probably disenchanted with me. For one thing, I suspected that I was not writing quite the way I wanted to write and at times I was oppressed by my weekly deadline. For another, in my job as a commentator, I was stuck with the editorial ‘we,’ a weasel word suggestive of corporate profundity or institutional consensus. I wanted to write as straight as possible, with no fuzziness.”
(By this point he and his wife Katharine already owned the farm in Maine. White felt “cooped up” and was tired of his job as a commentator, not that he disliked the New Yorker — he would work for them for many years to come, alongside his editor-by-mail wife.)
E.B. White on Lightning Rods: “I got a letter from a lightning rod company this morning trying to put the fear of God in me, but with small success. Lightning has lost its menace. Compared to what is going on on earth today, heaven’s firebrands are penny fireworks with wet fuses.”
E.B. White on Messages: “It is better to hear messages in static than no messages in anything.” (From his essay ‘Intimations’)
E.B. White on Misinformation: “Misinformation, even when it is not deliberate, is at the bottom of much human misery.” (From “The Thud of Ideas” written in 1950) [That whole piece deserves a study guide!]
E.B. White on New York City: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy… no one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”
E.B. White on Patriotism: “The very patriotism on which we now rely is the thing that must eventually be in part relinquished if the world is ever to find a lasting peace and an end to these butcheries.” (From his essay ‘Intimations’)
E.B. White on People Who Love the Whole Planet: “Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such people for the next society.” (From his essay ‘Intimations’)
E.B. White on Planning a Good World: “It is easier to plan a good world than a good nation… nothing can be worked out to the advantage of the human race as long as the mind is hampered and cramped by existing boundaries…” (From his essay “Compost”)
E.B. White on Preconceptions: “There is nothing so expensive, really, as a big, well developed, full bodied preconception.” (From ‘Getting Ready for a Cow’)
E.B. White on Science: “Science, however indiscriminately it has seemed in its bestowal of gifts, has no disturbing club affiliations.” (From his essay ‘Intimations’)
E.B. White on Security: “Young people have never bothered much about security, they have traditionally gone after adventure, romance, and derring-do. Now they are holding out their arm for the branding iron, surrendering their free selves to an illusive certainty.” (From “Security”)
E.B. White on Solitaire: “Even in a last extremity, with neither money nor hope, a man seizes a deck of cards and tries to run at solitaire, to restore himself and taste the time of luck.” (From his essay ‘Control’)
E.B. White on Television: “We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.”
[This essay was written in 1938, so TV was obviously quite novel at the time.]
“Television will… enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images — distant and concocted.”
[OK, did he have a time machine?]
E.B. White on the Future: “The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.” (From ‘Wave of the Future’)
E.B. White on the Little Red School of Yesterday: “…my guess is that the Little Red School of yesterday produced a lower average of intelligence but produced occasional individuals for the very best education there is, namely the knack and the will to seek and gain knowledge independently, without having it spooned out.” (From “Winter Diary”) [That would be me.]
E.B. White on the Problem of Security: “The problem of security is full of bewildering implications, pitfalls, and myths. It is paradoxical that the more secure a person gets in a material way, the less secure he may become in other ways.”
E.B. White on the Sears Catalog: “When you buy something in a store, you see it with your eyes and it has a prosaic and sometimes devastating reality. When you order something from Sears, it exists only in the mind’s eye, sugar-coated, triple-reinforced, and surrounded by an aura of light.” (From “Second World War”)
[This is how much of the first world now regards Amazon, I think.]
E.B. White on the World Being Done For: “I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing the world is done for, reach down and pick it up and put it on his compost pile. It ought to make a fine ferment.” (From his essay ‘My Day’)
E.B. White on Tolerant Men and Compassion: “There would never be a moment, in war or in peace, when I wouldn’t trade all the patriots in the county for one tolerant man. Or when I wouldn’t swap the vitamins in a child’s lunchbox for a jelly glass of compassion.”
E.B. White on Trains: “Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.”
E.B. White on World War Two: “The whole history of the war so far has been the inability of people in the democracies to believe their eyes and ears.” (From his essay ‘Intimations’)
[I’d say this is true of modern history as a whole.]
…
More to come.
