Essays of E. B. White (Perennial Classics)

Having just completed re-reading Essays of E. B. White, I am finally in agreement with those who call White the greatest essayist of the 20th century. I returned to White in part to escape to what seems a simpler time (a false notion, certainly, but the feeling is there nevertheless). What is it about White's essays that so fill me with joy? In biographical afterword to the book, Hal Hager quotes White himself with a reason:

"I discovered a long time ago," White wrote in a letter, "that writing of the small things of the day, trivial matter of the hearth, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sanctity or grace." With a prose style unmatched for its grace and "sanctity," he revealed--and revealed in--what is permanent and joy-giving in the "inconsequential" and the "trivial."

Writing today seems like a race to make everything written about seem the most important, most consequential thing out there, a race fueled by clicks, and views, and impressions, the coinage of the Internet. Most of it is trivial, and much of it is poorly written. White's writing provides a safe harbor from these storms. In "Home-Coming," for instance, White writes about his drive from New York in to Maine and how that scenery has changed over the year. He observed:

Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum, and if our findings differ, it is not that we differed greatly in powers of observation but that we were headed in different emotional directions.

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His essays show that it is the pace of life that changes, but the familiar remains. Writing about a hurricane in "The Eye of Edna", White comments on the fever and frenzy of weather broadcasts on the radio:

It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate.

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Inhabitants of any area that receives snow will recognize this behavior (which has not change much in the 65 years since the essay was written, at the outset of any snowstorm.

In his classic essay "Here Is New York," White is almost frighteningly prophetic in his vision of how destructible such a dense city as New York has become. In the essay, which is nearly 70 years old, White writes:

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.

White finds joy in transportation. He laments the demise of the Model-T in "Farewell, My Lovely!" He waxes poetic over the simple joy of sailing in "The Sea and the Winds That Blow." His essay, "The Railroad," is a eulogy for what was once a majestic form of transportation.

White's essays provide an escape from everything that announces its self-importance. His language is careful and casual, his manner self-depricating, but certain. In his essay on Don Marquis, White writes, "There are plenty of loud clowns and bad poets at work on papers today, but there are not many columnists adding to the belle lettres, and certainly there is no Don Marquis at work on any big daily."

Nor is there, alas, another E. B. White.