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| E. B. WHITE |
| A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. Be obscure clearly. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust. The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change--and we all instinctively avoid it. When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. After all, what's a life anyway? We're born, we live, we die. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows, anyone's life can stand a little of that. [Charlotte's Web] |
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