September 2023

From “The Planet” section of the book “Essays of E. B. White.” Reading with KC, Fall 2023.

Contents

Part III: The Planet

Letter from the East (1975)

Reads, in fact, like a long letter to a friend or family member. Moves across a variety of topics: seeds and seed catalogs; a local wedding; mining; local aquaculture; the energy crisis and nuclear and tidal energy. It has a lot of nice turns of phrase:

the bright and fraudulent pictures in a seed catalog
the glad cry that issues from a box of day old chicks
we have not missed a springtime of this wild dreaming and scheming

and the occasional bit of near-poetry: “The February days lengthen, the light strengthens and the plow goes by in the night. [p. 88]”

I don’t quite see a theme to this, except that quotidian human concerns come and go, while the life of the natural world is perennial. This is nicely captured at the end:

With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality, with its private pools of energy (the woodpile, the black stove, the germ in the seed, the chick in the egg), and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world. I know, too, that on some not too distant night, somewhere in pond or ditch or low place, a frog will awake, raise his voice in praise, and be joined by others. I will feel a whole lot better when I hear the frogs.
– p 98

Bedfellows (1956)

A sort of braided essays that moves between political figures (democrats in this case) who are present via their books, and the imagined presence of his now-deceased dog Fred: “Fred always attended the sick, climbing right into the bed with the patient like some lecherous old physician, and making a bad situation worse.“

“but his was the devotion of an opportunist”
“all half-truths excite me. An attractive half-truth in bed with a man can excite him as deeply as a cracker crumb.”
“when I see the first faint shadow of orthodoxy sweep across the sky, feel the first cold whiff of its blinding fog steal in from the sea, I tremble all over, as though I had just seen an eagle go by, carrying a baby.”

All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, though many men are born upright.
— E. B. White, Bedfellows, p. 104

… reading break …

Sootfall and Fallout (1956)

Begins with an account of observing moving vans from a windows with someone moving into a house, and then backs off to a larger view of the neighborhood. But then the essay, quite abruptly in my view, shifts to a discussion of soot from factories and other sources of pollution, and then to fall out from nuclear testing.

Unity (1960)

xxxx