Old White man

Some months ago my college girlfriend Hilary dropped me a note on one platform or another informing me that she intended to spend some time reading my blog. It's always an honor when someone allocates a chunk of any given day to reading my blog, what with the veritable universe of content out there I'm competing with and the negligible pizzazz of my modest corner of it. I awaited her feedback. Somewhere in there she asked for my address and then she sent me a copy of EB White's apparently classic tome of essays One Man's Meat, a collection of columns he published in Harper's from 1938-1943 after he had retreated from New York to Maine to tend an old family farm. White is of course the author of children's classics like Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, neither of which I have read, and one of the two creators of The Elements of Style, which I have around here somewhere.

This handsome little tome has now shared space on my bedside table for a while but I've been reading a little more of it recently, in preparation for maybe seeing her sometime over the next few months on some foray north. The first thing that strikes me as how old mannish White's reflections sound, despite the fact that he was only 39 when he started writing the essays. Then again, I was 38 when I started this blog. Surely some of the relative maturity of White's style derives from the historical moment when he was writing. His project commenced long prior to the advent of rock and roll and the permeation of youth culture down through the age deciles, which encourages all of us to pretend to be young for a long time (I of course still do a two-footed hop over the tennis net in every match) so as to preserve each individual's identification with the acceleration of product cycles and manufactured obsolescence. Young people consume more so it behooves a consumerist society that we should all feel young and ever in need of the ego support of our next purchase.

But around 1940, life expectancy in the US was 61 or 62. White was 2/3rds of the way there, roughly where I am now. Old assed bitch.