I first encountered the essayist E.B. White when my sixteen-year-old self bought the Elements of Strunk (yeah, Strunk). Since then this dead, old man (he died 86 years old) has been my almost-acquaintance– “not the type I would be drinking buddies with,” as one of my officemates puts it. The foreword about him in that Strunk book said he worked for The New Yorker, and back then I had no idea how huge The New Yorker was. I thought it was some sort of Daily Bugle. But then, Butch Dalisay would quote him in one of his Penman articles ~a couple years later:

“The circus comes as close to being the world in a microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade. Its magic is universal and complex. Out of its wild disorder comes order; from its rank smell rises the good aroma of courage and daring; out of its preliminary shabbiness comes the final splendor. And buried in the familiar boast of its advance agents lies the modesty of most of its people. For me the circus is at its best before it has been put together. It is at its best at certain moments when it comes to a point, as though a burning glass, in the activity and destiny of a single performer out of so many.

“Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources – from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.”

~ The Ring of Time

I think I would then read Charlotte’s Web after taking a short fiction class under Sir Dalisay. But aside from the constant thumbing of the Elements pages for the appropriate Strunkian rule– in school, at play, and then at work– I would have no other encounters with White. Until Maria Popova excessively quotes him in one of her brain pickings, which I would just mimic here:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

Thanks, Maria Popova!

I like the essay, have always liked it, and even as a child was at work, attempting to inflict my young thoughts and experiences on others by putting them on paper.

I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-century American letters — it stands a short distance down the line. The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence.

I think I’m doomed to become an essayist. I better buy me and this E.B. White guy some drinks some time.

PS I was midway into crafting a 250-word intro for my Game of Thrones post when WordPress decided to de-automate AutoSave. I was aiming for coherence with that one.