Rooftop perspective What are we fighting for?
Schilling, Timothy P
Timothy P. Schilling ROOFTOP PERSPECTIVE E. B. White & the fight against terrorism Home time in the fall of 1985 at Princeton I heard Stanley Hauerwas, the moral theologian (then of Notre Dame,...
...Although such a record is likely to seem incongruous, I see no harm in preserving it, the more so since I have begun to receive letters from soldiers overseas assuring me that there is a positive value to them in the memory of peace and home...
...Though it seems untimely I still publish my belief in the egg, the contents of the egg, the warm coal, and the necessity for pursuing whatever fire delights and sustains you.and sustains you...
...There is a lesson for our own time in their example...
...In the passage I recognized my own inclination to get on a roof in October, but more pertinently the Tightness of the observation...
...The point of terrorism is not nearly so much to destroy people or physical territory as it is to instill fear and distort our judgment-to keep people from enjoying a life that terrorists believe their victims have no right to enjoy...
...One's perspective at that altitude is unusually good...
...That was White's contribution and the contribution of millions of other, less eloquent souls...
...and anyway a man has to live according to his lights even if his lights are the red coals in the base of a firepot...
...It is what it is: a collection of mild, gently ironic, and at times pointedly funny essays about minor matters...
...It is from his April 1949 essay, "Spring": In this spring of 1941 a man tends to his fire in a trance that is all the deeper because of its dreamlike unreality, things being as they are in the world....But the land, and the creatures that go with it, are what is left that is good, and they are the authors of the book that I find worth reading...
...I am conducting my own peace these days...
...So he went on writing about the things he really knew, in the voice that was his own...
...Noting that Life magazine had called this New England tradition the quintessence of democracy, he cites his neighbor's reference to it as "the Chase & Sanborn hour...
...Yet it is instructive to see how White remains true to his own life and calling while coming to terms with the reality of the world war...
...Like many Americans, I suppose, I wondered during my waking hours what my calling might be with regard to the rising level of tension, conflict, and danger...
...The last word goes to White in gratitude...
...They give life its flavor, its perspective, and its daily pleasure and meaning...
...Here was a book that was the product of and an answer to precisely the sort of tension I was struggling with...
...Yet how does one strike this balance...
...It's like having a little business of my own," he wrote in "A Shepherd's Life," April 1940...
...They were...
...He argued that this was not the only political issue that mattered and that politics itself is not everything...
...The effectiveness of the September 11 attacks, as far as terrorists are concerned, has not so much to do with the fact that three thousand Americans were killed, but rather that the terrorists lodged themselves in the minds of hundreds of millions of Americans...
...Not by fleeing, or walling off the ugly world and avoiding the more dreadful tasks of making it better, but simply by keeping intact what is good and worthy in the life of my family and community, and by making my own necessary contribution to improving the world without obsessing about terrorism all the time...
...Reducing life to politics and politics to one issue, even the most pressing issue, constitutes a kind of "totalitarianism" that should be conscientiously avoided...
...But it was also won by people who kept the ideal of peace alive by preserving it in countless little ways...
...World War II was won with acts of courage and a tremendous sacrifice of blood...
...Timothy P. Schilling ROOFTOP PERSPECTIVE E. B. White & the fight against terrorism Home time in the fall of 1985 at Princeton I heard Stanley Hauerwas, the moral theologian (then of Notre Dame, now of Duke), lecture on "the ethical significance of the trivial...
...It seemed a queer place to be during a world crisis, an odd thing to be doing," White wrote...
...At that time nuclear annihilation in a showdown with the Soviet Union was a possibility on everyone's mind...
...The passage in question (from the essay "Clear Days," October 1938) had White on his barn roof laying cedar shingles while British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was negotiating "peace" with Hitler...
...Hauerwas, without denying the importance of the problem or undervaluing the efforts of those who devoted themselves to addressing it, however, asked us to see the problem in another way...
...At times White is positively lyrical, as in recounting a camping trip with his son: "the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet-fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end....It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving" ("Once More to the Lake," August 1941...
...A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom-he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold...
...The book was E. B. White's One Man's Meat, his collection of essays written for Harper's and the New Yorker between July 1938 and January 1943...
...In fact, the more of it I read (a few essays a week, over the course of months), the more I found it to be, at once, a salve, a reprieve, a concrete demonstration of how the tension could be managed, and a justification for holding to the little way...
...In the first months after the September 11 attacks I had nightmares about a dark fate awaiting our world...
...The passage brought to mind the Hauer-was lecture and White's own comment in the book's foreword: One Man's Meat is, as the title suggests, a personal record...
...For one with any affinity at all for small-town or country life, the pleasures of this volume are many...
...He keeps running his farm and writing, and he makes a case for doing just that...
...Hauerwas's argument has stayed with me because it struck me as true and highly relevant, and that feeling has not diminished now that terrorism is our preoccupation...
...They are...
...One could substitute "terrorist" for "despot" here...
...Countries are ransacked, valleys are drenched with blood...
...For isn't that exactly what terrorism aims at-the replacement of mundane tranquility and simple enjoyment with fear...
...His purpose was to make a case for the "trivial"-for continuing to invest in less prominent causes like saving the lemurs and taking time for leisure pursuits, like baseball...
...In "Salt Water Farm" (January 1939), he writes: I was sorry to hear the other day that a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world, had pledged himself never to write anything again that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving...
...What White does, above all, is stay the course...
...What White knew in his own circumstances is that the territory of the mind had to be more vigorously defended than the land itself, and that his own contribution lay in the depiction and appreciation of little things...
...Who has the longer view of things, anyway, a prime minister in a closet or a man on a barn roof...
...There is a certain clarity on a high roof, a singleness of design in the orderly work of laying shingles: snapping the chalk line, laying the butts to the line, picking the proper width shingle to give an adequate lap...
...These passing, pleasurable moments are the "meat" of the book...
...Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit a harmonious design or an inspirational tone...
...I was drinking a gin and tonic and reading while my wife cooked dinner and our daughter watched TV, when I came upon a passage that spoke directly to my predicament...
...But, In some respects...a barn is the best place anybody could pick for sitting out a dance with a prime minister and a demigod...
...At the same time, I have wanted desperately to preserve the peace of my own life and mind...
...I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news....Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or cinch bugs, and should write in a way that comes easy...
...Elsewhere (in "A Week in November," November 1942), White shows us his wife, son, and dachshund, sitting on the back porch under a lap robe, listening to the Cornell-Yale football game on the radio...
...At one point, White describes himself as a preserver of peace...
...Having said that, I don't want to claim more for the work than White himself claimed...
...It is a collection of essays which I wrote from a salt-water farm in Maine while engaged in trivial, peaceable pursuits, knowing all the time that the world hadn't arranged any true peace or granted anyone the privilege of indulging himself for long in trivialities...
...Attention to the ordinary tasks of life is one of the safeguards of personal equilibrium and has advantages for clear-sightedness...
...The details are the point for White, as when he describes his attendance at the annual town meeting...
...Some insight in this matter came to me during one of the rare idle moments I enjoy as the father of young children...
...For even in a time when the nuclear clock stands at five to midnight, these more mundane involvements are essential to what we understand "the good life"-the very life we are trying to preserve-to be...
...Though in the course of the book we see him support the war effort in direct ways-registering for the draft and helping conduct air raid drills, for example-his focus stays with the farm work and composing the light pieces that are his forte...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 19
