"The Chill of Death"

"He who can," George Bernard Shaw observed, "does. He who cannot, teaches." It is, though not entirely unfounded, a rather cheap comment. It is an undeniably false comment with regards to Strunk and White. Anyone who doubts the advice given therein need merely read the essays of E.B. White: they are exemplary. Skim One Man's Meat, an essay collection of his, and you'll happen upon any number of fine passages.

On priorities: "We teach our child many things I don't believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, but I do not honestly think there is any considerable good in punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by example, that the greatest defeat in life was to miss a train. Only after many years did I learn that an escaping train carries away with it nothing vital to my health. Railroad trains are such magnificent objects that we commonly mistake them for Destiny."

On church music: "The organ makes a curious whine, sentimental, grandiose — half cello, half bagpipes. ... Praise God from whom all blessings flow ... hesitatingly the assembled voices, embarrassed at the sudden sound of their own once-a-week excursion in piety, the too weak, the over strong, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

On poets: "We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets, however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring."

In "Once More to the Lake", perhaps White's best essay, he dwells on the confusion, the duality, he experiences in taking his son to the same lake he visited as a boy. He is, at once, the boy he was and the father he has become — taking the place of his own father. White is too fine a writer to try and draw some greater conclusion from this. (He is not inclined, in any of the essays, towards tiresome moralizing.) He does not claim that it is a good or necessary thing for society that a man should know what it is to become his father. All the same, I cannot help but think it. I then wonder: what of those who cannot, or will not, have children? (To say nothing of the many who certainly should not.) Are they to always remain the child, and never the parent? Is it necessary to have one's own offspring in order to fully mature as a person? Or, rather, perhaps, is it necessary that one take responsibility for those placed into one's care? (Surely you know teachers and other mentors, without children, who have nonetheless served you as parental figures.) It is, in any case, worth thinking about. Can we only truly confront our mortality — as White does — by observing those who we once were?