Jan 18, · Here Is New York by E.B. White, $13, Amazon. White's essay begins by getting straight to the heart of New York's character: On any person who Author: Charlotte Ahlin "Once More to the Lake", by E.B. White was an essay in which a father struggles to find himself. The essay is about a little boy and his father. They go to a lake where the father had been in his childhood years. The father looks back at those years and tries to relive the moments through his son's eyes Selected by E.B. White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are i/5
10 Great Articles and Essays by E.B. White - The Electric Typewriter
I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, eb white essay, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night.
This uncertainty afflicts me with eb white essay sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a eb white essay. The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, eb white essay, feeding it through summer and fall, eb white essay, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me eb white essay follows an antique pattern.
It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, eb white essay, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned. Once in a while something slips—one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts.
My pig simply failed to show up for a meal. The alarm spread rapidly. The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig's friend and physician—a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop. I had a presentiment, the very first afternoon, that the play would never regain its balance and that my sympathies were now wholly with the pig. This was slapstick—the sort of dramatic treatment which instantly appealed to my old dachshund, Fred, who joined the vigil, held the bag, and, when all was over, presided at the interment.
When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.
But I'm running ahead of my story and shall have to go back. My pigpen is at the bottom of an old orchard below the house. The pigs I have raised have lived in a faded building which once was an icehouse. There is a pleasant yard to move about in, shaded by an apple tree which overhangs the low rail fence. A pig couldn't ask for anything better—or none has, at any rate. The sawdust in the icehouse makes a comfortable bottom in which to root, and a warm bed.
This sawdust, however, came under suspicion when the pig took sick. One of my neighbors said he thought the pig would have done better on new ground—the same principle that applies in planting potatoes. He said there might be something unhealthy about that sawdust, eb white essay, that he never thought well of sawdust. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when I first noticed that there was something wrong with the pig.
He failed to appear at the trough for his supper, and when a pig or a child refuses supper a chill wave of fear runs through any household, or icehousehold. After examining my pig, eb white essay, who was stretched out in the sawdust inside the building, I went to the phone and cranked it four times.
Henderson answered. There is never any identification needed on a country phone; the person on the other end knows who is talking by the sound of the voice and by the character of the question. Henderson, eb white essay, "but I can find out quick enough. You hang up and I'll call Irving. Henderson was back on the line again in five minutes. He says he's almost sure the pig's plugged up, eb white essay, and even if he's wrong, it can't do any harm.
I didn't go right down to the pig, though. I sank into a chair and sat still for a few minutes to think about my troubles, and then I got up and went to the barn, catching up on some odds and ends that needed tending to. Unconsciously I held off, for an hour, the deed by which I would officially recognize the collapse eb white essay the performance of raising a pig; I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession eb white essay days.
I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation, eb white essay. I just wanted to keep on raising a pig, full meal after full meal, spring into summer into fall, eb white essay. I didn't even know whether there were two ounces of castor oil on the place.
Shortly after five o'clock I remembered that we had been invited out to dinner that night and realized that if I were to dose a pig there was no time to lose. The dinner date seemed a familiar conflict: I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody's house to dinner or anyone's coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up an hour or two in advance to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate.
I have come to believe that there is in hostesses a special power of divination, and that they deliberately arrange dinners to coincide with pig failure or some other sort of failure.
At any rate, it was after five o'clock and I knew I could put eb white essay no longer the evil hour. Eb white essay my son and I arrived at the pigyard, armed with a small bottle of castor oil and a length of clothesline, the pig had emerged from his house eb white essay was standing in the middle of his yard, listlessly.
He gave us a slim greeting. I could see that he felt uncomfortable and uncertain. I had brought the clothesline thinking I'd have to tie him the pig weighed more than a hundred pounds but we never used it. My son reached down, grabbed both front legs, eb white essay, upset him quickly, and when he opened his mouth to scream I turned the oil into his throat—a pink, corrugated area I had never seen before. I had just time to read the label while the neck of the eb white essay was in his mouth.
It said Puretest. The screams, slightly muffled by oil, were pitched in the hysterically high range of pigsound, as though torture were being carried out, but they didn't last long: it was all over rather suddenly, and, his legs released, the pig righted himself.
In the upset position the corners of his mouth eb white essay been turned down, giving him a frowning expression. Back on his feet again, he regained the set smile that a pig wears even in sickness. He stood his ground, sucking slightly at the residue of oil; a few drops leaked out of his lips while his wicked eyes, shaded by their coy little lashes, turned on me in disgust and hatred. I scratched him gently with oily fingers and he remained quiet, as though trying to recall the satisfaction of being scratched when in health, and seeming to rehearse in his mind eb white essay indignity to which he had just been subjected.
I noticed, as I stood there, four or five small dark spots on his back near the tail end, reddish brown in color, each about the size of a housefly, eb white essay.
I could not make out what they were. They did not look troublesome but at the same time they did not look like mere surface bruises or chafe marks. Rather they seemed blemishes of internal origin. His stiff white bristles almost completedly hid them and I had to part the bristles with my fingers to get a good look. Several hours later, a few minutes before midnight, having dined well and at someone else's expense, eb white essay, I returned to the pighouse with a flashlight.
The patient was asleep. Kneeling, I felt his ears as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child and they seemed cool, and then with the light made a careful examination of the yard and the house for sign that the oil eb white essay worked. I found none and went to bed. We had been having an unseasonable spell of weather—hot, close days, with the fog shutting in every night, scaling for a few hours in midday, then creeping back again at dark, drifting in first over the trees on the point, then suddenly blowing across the fields, blotting out the world and taking possession of houses, men, and animals.
Everyone kept hoping for a break, but the break failed to come. Next day was another hot one, eb white essay. I visited the pig before breakfast and tried to tempt him with a little milk in his trough, eb white essay.
He just stared at it, while I made a sucking sound through my teeth to remind him of past pleasures of the feast. With very small, timid pigs, weanlings, this ruse is often quite successful and will encourage them to eat; but eb white essay a large, sick pig the ruse is senseless and the sound I made must have made him feel, if anything, eb white essay, more miserable.
He not only did not crave food, he felt a eb white essay revulsion eb white essay it. I found a place under the apple tree where he had vomited in the night. At this point, although a depression had settled over me, I didn't suppose that I was going to lose my pig, eb white essay. From the lustiness of a healthy pig a man derives a feeling of personal lustiness; the stuff that goes into the trough and is received with such enthusiasm is an earnest of some later feast of his own, and when this suddenly comes to an end and the food lies stale and untouched, souring in the sun, the pig's imbalance becomes the man's, vicariously, and life seems insecure, displaced, transitory.
As my own spirits declined, along with the pig's, the spirits of my vile old dachshund rose. The frequency of our trips down the footpath through the orchard to the pigyard delighted him, although he suffers greatly from arthritis, moves with difficulty, and would be bedridden if he could find anyone willing to serve him meals on a tray. He never missed a chance to visit the pig with me, and he made many professional calls on his own.
You could see him down there at all hours, his white face parting the grass along the fence as he wobbled and stumbled about, his stethoscope dangling—a happy quack, writing his villainous prescriptions and grinning his corrosive grin. When the enema bag appeared, and the bucket of warm suds, his happiness was complete, and he managed to squeeze his enormous body between the two lowest rails of the yard and then assumed full charge of the irrigation.
Once, when I lowered the bag to check the flow, he reached in and hurriedly drank a few mouthfuls of the suds to test their potency. I have noticed that Fred will feverishly consume any substance that is associated with trouble—the bitter flavor is to his liking. When the bag was above reach, he concentrated on the pig and was everywhere at once, a tower of strength and inconvenience.
The pig, curiously enough, stood rather quietly through this colonic carnival, and the enema, though ineffective, was not as difficult as I had anticipated. I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.
The pig's lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession. His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness. Along toward the end of the afternoon, defeated in physicking, I phoned the veterinary twenty miles away and placed the case formally in his hands.
He was full of questions, and when I casually mentioned the dark spots on the pig's back, his voice changed its tone. Then I addressed the vet again. Mac knows eb white essay about pigs than Eb white essay do anyway, eb white essay. You needn't worry too much about the spots. To indicate erysipelas they would have to be deep hemorrhagic infarcts.
If the pig has erysipelas I guess I have it, too, eb white essay, by this time, because we've been very close lately. I hung up, eb white essay. My throat felt dry and I went to the cupboard and got a bottle of whiskey. Deep hemorrhagic infarcts—the phrase began fastening its hooks in my head.
I had assumed that there could be nothing much wrong with a pig during the months it was being groomed for murder; my confidence in the essential health and endurance of pigs had been strong and deep, eb white essay, particularly in the health of pigs that belonged to me and that were part of my proud scheme.
Some Author: The Life of EB White
, time: 3:45blogger.com: Essays of E. B. White (Perennial Classics) (): White, E. B: Books
White's essays bears the hallmark of tightness. Also, they also show what he and his master believe in: cut needless words. And each of them love to shout the slogan for three times. For other rules, one can check out The Elements of blogger.com by: 6 Jan 18, · Here Is New York by E.B. White, $13, Amazon. White's essay begins by getting straight to the heart of New York's character: On any person who Author: Charlotte Ahlin Selected by E.B. White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are i/5
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