Status Updates From Essays of E. B. White

Paraphrasing this one: Some men are bound to make the world more convenient even if it means destroying it in the process.

“If our future journeys are to be little different from flashes of light, with no interim landscape and no interim thought, I think we will have lost the whole good of journeying and will have succumbed to the mere preoccupation with getting there.”

I'm charmed! Enchanted! Oh what a delight. Multiple sentences already leaped right into my heart. "A man can be launched, or catapulted, into the Christmas tree business quite by surprise." I mean come ON

“…fraudulence has become a national virtue and is well thought of in many circles.”

How much did I like Blue Moon? Turns out Lorenz Hart and E.B. White never even met in real life and I’m still running to read his essays. Though of course already I’m seeing that I think the choice of White, specifically, was far from arbitrary.

In any event, the White style of essay is extinct in any meaningful sense. Hard to say we suffer greatly from its lack, but once you notice— it’s hard to ignore.

“Justice will find a home where there is a synthesis of liberty and unity in a framework of government.”

“All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.”