Charlotte's Maker

I have to share with you some excerpts from the book I've been reading lately. It's just too good not to share.

The book is called THE POINTS OF MY COMPASS. It's a book of essays, or "letters" as the author, EB White calls them - though they clearly are essays, not letters. I like to think of them as vintage blog posts. That's really what they are: musings, opinions, diary entries, vicissitudes of the everyday. Most of them were written for The New Yorker, in the 1950's. After each one, there's a postscript, also by EB White. According to the the Foreword, the postscripts were written after the author found these "letters" in his attic in 1962 and spent hours crouched on the floor, "savoring the pains and embarrassments of an early love, and with leg cramps to boot."

The book in it's entirety is a great read word for word (at least so far, I'm only half way through). I have never read anything by EB White prior to this. Not even Charlotte's Web (gasp). I've seen the movie forty thousand times, and love the story, but it never occurred to me to read it. Nor have I read Stuart Little. After reading this, I will dig out every bit of EB White I can glean from the library, used book stores, maybe even Ebay. With certainty I can say that Mr. White and I, we are going to walk shoulder to shoulder for a long time. Well, he may be one step ahead of me...

In every essay there are single sentences that make me laugh out loud involuntarily. There are sentences that make me sigh that sigh that says, "Yes! Yes! I completely agree, wholeheartedly...I feel the exact same way...but I could never put that into words..." And there are paragraphs filled with notions that make me think, "Oh, I never thought of that, that's so true, isn't it?" This is good reading. Sometimes my heart races with the acknowledgment that someone else saw the world as I do, or as I wish I could.

I can't share it all with you, though I'd really like to. I thought about giving this book as a prize in the photo contest because I want to share it so. But, I'm way too selfish for that. I've looked up EB White books on Ebay and this one doesn't even surface. It isn't even mentioned in the first few pages when you Google "books by EB White" (I didn't look further than the first few pages). I don't know if it's rare. I'm just glad I have it. I got it from the 50-cent shelf at the library. The binding is torn, which is what drew me to it, and it has a little handwritten inscription inside the cover: "Christmas 1962. Danny: Your first snuff of E.B. -- hope you get hooked. With love, Judy." My copy of the book (okay, Danny's copy) was printed in 1962, so Judy was apparently as captivated as I have just become. I hope Danny was too. But I'm glad he donated his copy to the library for their 50-cent shelf.

Okay. So here are just a couple of great "moments" from the book. Enjoy.

There are several essays that are strewn with anecdotes about EB's dog, a dachshund who died years before the essays were written. He actually owned two dachshunds, successively. This is about the first one...

Once up, he settled into his pose of bird-watching, propped luxuriously against a pillow, as close as he could get to the window, his great soft brown eyes alight with expectation and scientific knowledge. He seemed never to tire of this work. He watched steadily and managed to give the impression that he was a secret agent of the Department of Justice. Spotting a flicker or a starling on the wing, he would turn and make a quick report.
"I just saw an eagle go by," he would say. "It was carrying a baby."

And in another essay, he discusses his opinions on the fervent desire in the world of 1956, to move to nuclear energy, among other things.

Dr. Fritz Zwicky, the astrophysicist, has examined the confused situation on this planet, and his suggestion is that we create one hundred new planets. Zwicky wants to scoop up portions of Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter and graft them onto smaller planets, then change the orbits of these enlarged bodies to make their course around the sun roughly comparable to that of our earth. This is a bold, plucky move, but I would prefer to wait until the inhabitants of this planet have learned to live in political units that are not secret societies and until the pens on the writing desks in banks are not chained to the counter. Here we are, busily preparing ourselves for a war already described as "unthinkable," bombarding our bodies with gamma rays that everybody admits are a genetical hazard, spying on each other, rewarding people on quiz programs with a hundred thousand dollars for knowing how to spell "cat," and Zwicky wants to make a hundred new worlds. Maybe he gained confidence to go ahead when he heard that in Florida they had succeeded in putting an elephant on water skis. Any race of creatures that can put an elephant on water skis is presumably ready to construct new worlds.

In an essay entitled Motorcar, he muses about the status of design in the auto industry.

There is always the chance that during a time of crisis some car manufacturer will shake free from the vision of stratocruisers and rockets and at last see the automobile for what it is -- a handy little four-wheeled contraption that moves along the surface of the earth carrying an American family on errands of an inconsequential nature...

And lastly for today, he begins another essay with this, my favorite line in the book so far.

I bought a puppy last week in the outskirts of Boston and drove him to Maine in a rented Ford that looked like a sculpin.

I am hoping for a few minutes to read more tonight. My reading time is very limited, though when I finally find something I "can't put down" I try to pick it up at least once a day.

I think I'll use a line from this book as a "Snippet" later this week. Watch for that. Have a happy week.