Departing Maine for a bit

As I recently mentioned, the end of EB White's One Man's Meat was at long last drawing nigh, and I was determintd to reach it. Which I have now done. 

Towards the end of the book, as momentum built, I at long last fully caught White's gestalt, his deep appreciation for the rhythms of nature and history, the arc of his own life, and the intertwinedness of the whole thing. Though my life is resolutely suburban and mostly devoted to outsourcing the making and doing of many things and tasks to others, White embraced the making, doing, fixing, preserving, husbanding necessary to live on a farm. My life, in short, is a good deal more abstracted up, where his was concreted down. Though it must be owned that he thought deeply and wrote elegantly about the relationships between himself and the worlds he lived in, at home, in community, the globe, and the cosmos. And that my often forcible reintegration into the manual tasks of preserving and managing matter -- as with Tolstoi and his broom and Shklovsky's reflections thereupon -- was my blog's primal scene. 

In the end I can only be deeply flattered by the likeness sensed by Hilary which caused her to send me the book a few years back. To be honest, I am tempted to begin the book again or to go get more of his stuff. But first, a mystery novef.