E.B. White and the other stories

 E.B. White helped The New Yorker remember the other stories. If you work in print, you are tempted to think that the story is about politics, economics or perhaps high society. This is particularly true if you think that you live in the center of the world and that the people you are writing about are the most important people in the world.

And then there was White, who insisted on covering the dog show or writing a piece about a waiter who was celebrating a perfect spring day while grieving that the forecast called for snow.

It seems to me that American journalism could use a few more characters like White, especially now, when we are tempted to see every facet of American life in terms of what the Current Occupant of the White House is doing. It’s possible to think that the news of the Current Occupant and his disastrous influence on the democracy is vital while still thinking he’s overexposed.

The problem with linking every aspect of American life to any personality is that it inflates the significance of that personality.

The United States and its neighbors are hosts of the World Cup. We would be watching soccer with or without the Current Occupant.

Citizens would be reflecting over the country’s 250^th anniversary, with or without the Current Occupant staging celebratory cage fights on the White House lawn.

White was the kind of fellow who kept up with the big news but never lost sight of the other stories.

His granddaughter Martha White pointed out that he covered the doings at the Bronx Zoo and the “fabulous ice extravaganza at the Garden,” but never spent much time with the Algonquin Round Table. He noticed the juncos that live in the great city in winter.

If you haven’t guessed, I’m marking a birthday. E.B. White was born July 7, 1899. His granddaughter said he considered it to be a lucky day.

• Source: Martha White: “‘Small But Unforgettable Moments.’ What E.B. White Loved About New York City”; Lit Hub, Nov. 25, 2024. It’s here:

https://lithub.com/small-but-unforgettable-moments-what-e-b-white-loved-about-new-york-city/

Bound to the earth by stories

 I think this is right about our sense of place: Some people believe that wisdom comes from above, from an authoritative voice in the heavens. Others believe that there is an order within the cosmos, and that wisdom is living wisely within that order, right now, right here, on the Earth.

And if you take that view from the level of humanity to the individual that is me, wisdom means finding a way to live within the order of the place I live.

We humans carry that wisdom in stories.

In his essay “Telling the Holy,” Scott Russell Sanders argues that we catch glimpses of the way to live in ways that better reflect the natural order and capture those insights in sacred stories, or myths. We humans tell all kinds of stories — stories that convey information and statistics and news about everything from politics to baseball. But it’s those stories about how to live that hold us.

I think a sense of place is essential. I think these lines from Sanders’s essay are wonderful:

 

I am bound to the earth by a web of stories, just as I am bound to creation by the very substance and rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiarity and pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still.

 

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 150.

A voice of nature

 If you are of a certain disposition, you think that plants and animals speak to you in a certain way, telling you about the place you call home. I thought the big scarab beetle was telling me that there were plenty of muscadines in the woodlot.

Experts say Pelidnota punctata is called the grapevine beetle, although I’ve never heard that common name. These beetles love grapevines, wild and cultivated. They eat foliage and grapes.

The one that accosted me was light tan and about an inch long. He had four dark spots down each side, as if its top and bottom had been fastened together with tiny rivets.

The beetle spent its larval period in the woodlot, eating decaying vegetation. Adults emerge in July.

I’d love to tell you that the beetle spoke to me because it recognized my remarkable powers of observations. But it crashed into me while flying across the garden.

Places and stories

 Colm Tóibín says that minor impressions sometimes stay in notebooks for decades until he understands what he’s seen. Often, the story gets energy from the memories of a place where he stayed, a room he lived in. That place becomes part of the story.

Tóibín, who teaches at Columbia University, said it would take a while for him to be able to write about the room he was living and working in when Trump was elected to a second term. When he does write, the room will be framed in a way — part of a completed story.

 

This is the room where I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.

 

I like that idea. You could say, as people do, that a place is just where a story is set. But I think that place is where a story is understood.

• Source: Colm Tóibín, “‘I’ve learned first-hand how evil is tolerated’: Colm Tóibín on living in the US under Trump”; The Guardian, March 21, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/21/ive-learned-first-hand-how-evil-is-tolerated-colm-toibin-on-living-in-the-us-under-trump

Tóibín wrote this when his new collection of short stories, The News from Dublin, was published. I’m late to the party.

A craftsman and his ways

 This weekend, I watched a craftsman work. He didn’t mind the company. 

His way of working struck me as careful, precise and unhurried.

As if he’d read my mind, he said: “I can work rapidly, quickly. But I don’t hurry.”

My Texas grandmother spoke of people and their ways — the idea being that the way people approach things is important.

I’m interested in the way people work and usually notice their habits, routines and schedules. But that’s just a part of it. Before some people pick up a tool, they bring an approach to their work — perhaps it’s something you sense in their demeanor or presence — that’s subtle but noticeable. 

The poet William Stafford gets at that quality with these lines:

 

Wisdom is having things right in your life

and knowing why.

If you do not have things right in your life

you will be overwhelmed:

you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

 

• Source: William Stafford’s poem “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune” is in The Way It Is; Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 141. 

Not yet

Salmon P. Chase, who is probably best known as President Lincoln’s treasury secretary, was prone to brooding over the American experiment. Here’s a sample:

 

The Democracy is not democratic enough yet.

 

That was written in 1868, when Chase was chief justice of the United States. What was true in 1868 is still true today. Can you imagine what it would be like if the ranking officer in the federal judicial system believed that?

• Source: The original source is the Salmon Portland Chase Papers in the Library of Congress, but I found the remark in William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 134.

Greats and commoners

 To think you can persuade people strikes many reasonable people as a quaint idea. Haven’t we all read about how polarized the country is? How no one in a political camp can be persuaded by evidence?

Some people don’t change their minds. The Make America Great Again movement is evidence that about four in 10 American voters are not persuaded by anything.

And yet public opinion does change.

I grew up in places that had separate drinking fountains and segregated schools.

When I was a kid, the level of raw sewage that could be released into the watersheds around New York City was roughly one quart in a bathtub-full.

Things that we once accepted disgust us today.

Human beings do change. Although it takes too long, we eventually see the light of better ways.

Trying to persuade others is slow, tedious and frustrating. But when people change their minds, the change is real in a way that what we call a political victory isn’t. One party wins an election and gets the upper hand on the other. But political parties can’t win elections indefinitely supporting policies that the majority opposes.

The slow, frustrating work of trying to persuade your neighbors can be discouraging. It helps me to take a long view and think of Montaigne, who lived through horrific times. When he started publishing his Essays in 1580, Europeans were exterminating each other in wars of religion.

Montaigne loved his place in the world but could appraise it objectively. He thought of himself as a Gascon rather than a Frenchman, a man of the region rather than a man of the country. He was loyal to the government of his day.

He was interested in the people, the institutions and the customs of the people, although he thought of the people, institutions and customs of his region, rather than of the country. He was not interested in the Great Men and Great Women of his day. As he put it:

 

I feel, by the way, no driving passion about the great of the land, neither love nor hatred. …

 

I find it hard to govern my own feelings about our country’s leaders. But I think Montaigne’s counsel is sound. There’s wisdom in paying attention to the health, education, welfare and prosperity of the ordinary people and their institutions. If you want better representative government, start with the people. The commoners, not the greats.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 893. The quotation is from “On the useful and the honourable,” the opening essay in Book III.