Do not worry about me.

Have you read much E.B.White?   I keep a volume of his essays near my bed, because he’s the one writer who can put an instant smile on my face, regardless of mood.  Back when he wrote for the New Yorker, he’d pen these short, one-or-two paragraph essays that are just pure joy, consolidated.

The last image in this one never fails to make me smile, both for the image itself, and for the restraint in describing it:

Sometimes we regret our failure to write about things that really interest us.  The reason we fail is probably that to write about them would prove embarrassing.  The things that interested us during the past week, for example, and that we were unable or unwilling to write about (things that stand out clear as pictures in our head) were: the look in the eye of a man whose overcoat, with velvet collar, was held together by a bit of string; the appearance of an office after the building had shut down for the night, and the obvious futility of the litter; a short eulogy of John James Audubon, who spent his life loafing around, paining birds; an entry in Art young’s diary, about a sick farmer who didn’t know what was the matter with himself but thought it was probably biliousness; and the sudden impulse that we had (and very nearly gratified) to upend a large desk for the satisfaction of seeing everything on it slide off slowly onto the floor.

I love this one for how he manages to convey cynicism with gentle humor:

When he heard about the National Arts club prize for a book which would ‘reveal the soul of America,’ one of our dearest friends sat right down and god to work.  He had a good plot, and seemed, when we left him, to be much interested in getting it down on paper.  When, a day or two later, we saw him again, we were surprised to learn that he had given up the project.  It seems that when he read about the prize in the newspaper, he thought it said thirty thousand dollars; later he looked up the clipping and discovered it said three thousand dollars.  True to the soul of America, he gave the thing up immediately.

And to cap it off, here’s a lovely passage from a longer essay on liberalism:

The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive…

The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself.  He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man’s invitation to take a walk.  And he acts in the dog’s way, too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth.  He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.  The dog often influences the course the man takes, on his long walk; for sometimes a dog runs into something in nature so arresting that not even a man can quite ignore it, and the man deviates – a clear victim of the liberal intent in his dumb companion.  When the two of them get home and flop down, it is the liberal – the wide-ranging dog – who is covered with burdocks and with information of a special sort on out-of-the-way places.  Often ineffective in direct political action, he is the opposite of the professional revolutionary, for, unlike the latter, he never feels he knows where the truth lies, but is full of rich memories of places he has glimpsed it in.

Just some late-night reading to (I hope) put a smile on your face.  Cheers.