1 week Ago
These are, to put it gently, interesting times: trade wars looming, stock markets swooning, unemployment stirring, government agencies closing, universities reeling, immigrants and lawyers cowering, the rule of law crumbling. Amid this torrent of unsettling events, people are no doubt taking solace and distraction where they can find it, whether in the season finale of “The White Lotus” or the warm embrace of a good book. My go-to mood enhancer these days is E.
B. White , a Maine farmer and writer known mostly for those 20th-century children’s classics “Stuart Little” (1945), “The Trumpet of the Swan” (1952) and the magnificent “Charlotte’s Web” (1970), which I dare you to finish with a dry eye. Less well-known is White’s career as an essayist at The New Yorker magazine for nearly 60 years.
He could write with gentle wit and swan-like grace about nearly anything — the weather, the Model T Ford, the death of an ailing pig. He generally avoided anything as serious as politics or world affairs. But from time to time, when his beloved country found itself in difficult straits — as it does today — White would rise to the occasion.
Some of his more timeless musings are available online, others in the more than two-dozen volumes of his collected works. I recommend starting with the gem that President Franklin D. Roosevelt liked to read aloud to almost anyone who’d listen.
It’s from The New Yorker’s July 3, 1943, issue. America was at war, and things weren’t going entirely well. The Writers’ War Board, a group of literary figures working under government auspices, asked White to write something on “ The Meaning of Democracy .
” His response, barely 200 words long, still quickens my pulse. Democracy, he wrote, “is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove.
It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
Democracy is a letter to the editor. [It is] an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.
Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” Three years earlier, with Hitler and Mussolini on the rise, White had performed a similar service to the idea of freedom . “I just want to tell,” he trumpeted, “that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war.
From such adaptable natures a smell arises. I pinch my nose.” That was more than a decade before the 1950s Red Scare and Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts, both of which shamefully few Americans tried to stop.
And longer still before the surrender of some corporations, universities, law firms and even news organizations to the demands of our current would-be dictator. If White were still with us, he no doubt would be thundering against those who counsel accommodation with evil, while he exhorted the rest of us to keep fighting it. And, as was his custom, doing all that while appearing to address an entirely different subject.
Consider the concluding words of his 1939 account of a day spent fishing: “It struck me as we worked our way homeward up the rough bay with our catch of lobsters and a fresh breeze in our teeth that this was what the fight was all about ...
. This was it. Either we would continue to have it or we wouldn’t, this right to speak our own minds, haul our own traps, mind our own business, and wallow in the wide, wide sea.
” In 1973, amid the Cold War and the rising threat of nuclear extinction, the author received a letter from a reader lamenting that he had lost faith in humanity. White promptly wrote back with a ringing expression of confidence in the contagious quality of hope: “As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time.
I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness ...
. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Hang onto your hat. Hang onto your hope. And wind your clock, for tomorrow is another day.
” White died quietly on his 40-acre saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, in 1985 — exactly 40 years too soon..
