Essays of E. B. White
When E.B. White received the Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the following citation, here quoted in part, accompanied the award: "If we are remembered as a civilized era, I think it will be partly because of E.B. White. The historians of the future will decide that a writer of such grace and control could not have been produced by a generation wholly lacking in such qualities, and we will shine by reflection in his gentle light. "Of all the gifts he has given us in his apparently casual essays, the best gift is himself. He has permitted us to meet a man who is both cheerful and wises, the owner of an uncommon sense that is lit by laughter. When he writes of large subjects he does not make them larger and windier than they are, and when he writes of small things they are never insignificant. He is, in fact, a civilized human being - an order of man that has always been distinguished for its rarity." The essays in this companion volume to the Letters to E.B. White have been selected by White himself, from a lifetime of writing. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading." he writes in the Foreword, "along with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." The Essays of E.B. White are incomparable, like his Letters, this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.
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What Hacker News says
- It's easy to forget what a big deal rail is in the USA, because the freight lines successfully lobbied Congress to allow them to eliminate the passenger cards they used to be required to add to the end of their freight trains. Back when that was the case passenger rail travel in the USA was cheap and ubiquitous, because it went everywhere the mail did. E.B. White has a wonderful little essay[1] about it. The full text can be found in the excellent Essays of E.B. White[2].
[1] http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=91313
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394616.Essays_of_E_B_Whi...
- On the essay form, I don't yet see a mention of the excellent Essays of E. B. White[1]. Yes, the same one from 'Strunk and White' of The Elements of Style.
Two essays that I still vividly remember from the book (both were written around 1940s):
(1) Coon Tree
(2) Death of a Pig
These are indeed essays with an "an odor of durability", as White puts it while he ruminates in the preface about what he was considering to publish.
Get the entire book[1], his writing reeks with humanity.
[1]https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-wh...
- I've read the article in full. It raises an important point, but it's indeed a laborious read. As I read it, the haunting paragraph from The Elements of Style came to mind:
"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
If you enjoy the essay form, I highly recommend the "Essays of E.B. White" (yes, the same White of The Elements of Style). Some of the essays stay with you for a long time.- - -https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-wh...
- E.B. White has a wonderful essay called The Railroad that describes how the railroads and the government worked together to cripple US passenger rail. It isn't online, but I found a blog post[1] discussing it. It's also in the collection Essays of E.B. White which I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys perspicuous prose.
The gist of the essay is that the railroads incrementally made the passenger experience worse and then as demand declined they used the declining demand to justify further worsening the passenger experience[2]. From the railroads' perspective this was a virtuous positive feedback loop, insofar as it got them out of the relatively low margin passenger business. That then got dumped on Amtrak, which is awful for many reasons, not least of which is their trains are the lowest priority on the tracks they lease, so they are virtually never on time. I imagine Amtrak executives would also love to get out of the passenger transport business too, if they could somehow swing it to keep getting federal money. Anyhow it really is a great essay and I highly recommend reading it since my summary can't do it justice.
[1] https://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=91313
[2] A lesson corporations now apply with disappointing prevalence.
- > i suspect that the blog format discourages the latter.
I don't really see how the blog format makes this any worse than writing published essays did.
The foreword to "American Essays"[1] edited by Shaw is remarkably relevant and on-point for what I would consider the good parts of blogs and on-line writing. There aren't all that many that I am aware of that write consistently and well - apart from the odd article in The New Yorker, Greenspun, Spolsky, Graham as well as Norvig are a few that come to mind (and I'm reminded I've not really read anything by any of them lately).
Many of the blogs that are posted here on hn are good first drafts, that if the author found the time to put in about three to five times the effort, might be considered decent essays. I absolutely understand why people don't do that -- it is a lot of work, for little immediate reward. But I think that a lot of writers could do well to aspire to match Hemmingway or White, rather than just trudging out interesting first-drafts and sketched ideas.
I believe the greatest benefits to the authors, other than improving their writing skill, would probably be improving their thinking - the level of understanding needed to write simply and delightfully about a subject is significantly above the level needed to jot down a few ideas and join them into sentences by rote application of a few stylistic guidelines.
We should probably all aspire to write better than a well-trained neural network that takes a few keywords as input ;-)
[1] Unfortunately I only have the paperback, and can't find the time to transcribe it all. Should be available as a preview in the Kindle edition, I assume: https://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B00...
The volume appears to be oddly missing from Google books, I would think that has been scanned, but it appears not: https://www.google.no/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=e+b+white+essay...
I also came across an old note on another essay collection, "Essays of E.B. White" - from his own foreword:
"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. (...) Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses (...). The essayist (...) selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter -- philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast. I like the essay, (...) but 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. (...)
There is one thing the essayist cannot do, though -- he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time. Desmond MacCarthy, in his introductory remarks to the 1928 E. P. Dutton & Company edition of Montaigne, observes that Montaigne "had the gift of a natural candour....". It is the basic ingredient. And even the essayist's escape from discipline is only a partial escape: the essay, although a relaxed form, imposes its own disciplines, raises its own problems, and these disciplines and problems soon become apparent and (we all hope) act as a deterrent to anyone wielding a pen merely because he entertains random thoughts or is in a happy or wandering mood.
I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor."
https://books.google.no/books?id=wkTusWRWdlQC&pg=PA4&dq=e+b+...-- E. B. White, 1977, in foreword to Essays of E. B. WhiteAs a mental exercise, substitute "blog" and "blogger" for "essay" and "essayist" as appropriate...
