E. B. White & Intellectual Theft

                In a moment of insomniatic frustration at about 3am, I picked up a book called Essays of E.B. White.  Why is this particular book by my bed?  Because it was offered as suggested reading for an English 12 equivalency class.  Ha!  Not hardly.  Based on the roughly 20 paged I read, I found about 100 words most average 12^th graders couldn’t define if they had a gun to their head.  But that’s not the point. 

                The forward of the book spoke to me as a writer.  Let me steal a few examples:

“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 … 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.”  -White

                I couldn’t agree more.  Whenever I write my essays and then subsequently post them on my blog, I think, “who cares about this shit besides me?”  I write these ramblings about education and politics and life in general, with some ridiculously self-centered notion that anyone wants to hear my opinions about public policy or midlife crises.  Most likely, they don’t.  But that doesn’t stop me from sampling from the variety of ideas in my head and committing them to paper (or cyberspace), because the articulation of ideas is all I have.  It keeps me sane, and allows me to share in some (possibly imagined) community of kindred souls in the world.

                Allow me to keep plagiarizing here … 

“(The essayist could) be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter – philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast … I tend to fall back on the essay form (or lack of form) when an idea strikes me, but I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-century 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.”  -White

                Indeed, Mr. White.  The writers who are respected are those who write novels.  The average person in 21^st Century America isn’t an avid reader of poetry (we’ve forced all the poets to be musicians if they want a paycheck), and the closest most people get to playwrights is watching sitcoms on tv.  Yes, some people can afford to attend Broadway productions and/or local theater productions, but most people rely on screenplays (movies) and scripts (television) for their stories.  People want to be entertained, not educated. 

                The greatest part of essay writing is the lack of rules imposed on the writer.  Write what you want.  Spew opinion.  Be an expert on Indian restaurants in the Omaha area today and a connoisseur of vintage clothing the next.  The down side to this, of course, is that when a person doesn’t choose ONE field of expertise, their opinions of everything are perceived as muddled.  No one would read my blog and say it’s about “this” or “that,” because the ADD takes topicality everywhere, depending on my mood.  I agree with Mr. White that the freedom of entertaining random thoughts and allowing my mind to wander is the best part of writing.  He suggests that means those of us who write this way are self-absorbed and egotistical (which is probably true), and that we pay too much attention to our own lives and not enough to the lives of others, but I think the whole point of writing these essays and then throwing them out to whoever might care to read them is like a spider throwing off filament to attach to things – the words are my way of trying to connect to other people and start a dialogue (though I very rarely ever get a response, which may say something about the nature of my ability to write). 

                I have no apparent chronology, no master scheme, but the process of writing essays, and the fact that they can be set aside and left alone (rather than revisited and edited and rewritten and beat to death) is the very nature of their attraction for me.  I may have written something a year ago which I disagree with today, but I’m not going to go back and change what I wrote.  We are who we are in any given moment.  Lives cannot be rewritten, only offered up for whatever they may be worth.