My husband and I just had our first grandchild, a splendid little baby boy who lives close enough for us to visit every Saturday. We've developed a custom of reading some of the essays out loud on the trip out and back. This book is too delightful not to share it!

I've been asking myself what makes these essays so delicious to read? I've come up with quite a few reasons. One major one for me is their timelessness, something all of us have commented on. I get a real kick out of reading something written 70 years ago that sounds as if it were written yesterday. I came across this again in "Fro-Joy" (what is that word anyway I wondered -- all the other chapters have such easy to comprehend titles). At any rate, in this chapter White spoofs the government's tax forms, citing Section G of Form 1040 which "was obviously written by a lawyer in one of his flights of rhetorical secrecy". I think he might be disappointed but maybe not surprised at the lack of improvement in the tax forms today.

In this same chapter White talks about school consolidation, which he says has great advantages (color schemes and cloak rooms with ventilation) but maybe something is lost in the process. Instead of walking the four miles to school, now the young scholars in his town ride busses. "There is more to a journey than the mere fact of arrival. If the consolidated school served by busses destroys that in our children I don't know that we are ahead of the game after all."

And of course there's his sense of humor. I'll be reading about potatoes or dreams or something equally mundane when all of a sudden he throws in something outlandish. For example in "My Day," he talks about the end of the world. Although his neighbors feel it will have a certain strange light in the sky, perhaps with smoke and fire, White describes it this way: "I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing that 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."

Finally I find the character of the author quite appealing. He leads a simple life, caring for his sheep and chickens, and maybe because of that, he's able to view the greater picture. His foreword to the 4th edition comments on this: "Here then is a book in a time of swords, a thought or two in a time of deeds, a celebration of life in a period of violent death...I offer [it] not with any idea that it is meaty but with the sure knowledge that it is one man -- one individual unlimited, with the hope of liberty and justice for all."

E-mail this entry to a friend