I was very happy to be asked this week to provide a jacket blurb for a book Tilbury House is publishing next Spring called E.B. White on Dogs,” a collection of White’s dog essays edited by his granddaughter, Martha White. E.B. White was a brilliant writer and essayist – his book “One Man’s Meat” was an important inspiration to me in my coming to Bedlam Farm and writing from there. White, a New Yorker writer as well as an author bought a saltwater farm in Maine relatively late in his life in his life and “One Man’s Meat” is a collection of his gentle, generous and beautifully written essays on rural life, and also his life with dogs and other animals.

White has always been the writer I wish to be. I love his elegant and rational style of writing. I remember his mythic essay on encountering nature, “Once More To The Lake.” I also share his notion of a writer’s duty: “In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.” He once begged his readers who bombarded him with letters to understand that “there are 10,000 of you and one of me.” I wonder how he would handle Facebook. With grace and humor, I think.

White pleasure in many of things I take pleasure – the beauty of the country, bingo games, merchants who know you, chicken dinners, the simplicity of the people, their strong connection to family and place, their wellspring of humor and lore.

I sometimes think that fear springs from not accepting who you are and what you wish your life to be. Of not owning up to it, or being afraid you will pay more for it than you can afford. White seemed to have no problem with that.  White’s vision of his life is believed to be vanishing in America, thought to be gone forever. His ethos was at the heart of what many of us would call the national identity – a genuinely participatory democracy, pride in individualism, self-discovery and most of all, self-reliance.

White did not live to see these ideals come under ferocious siege from corporatism and greed, the shackles of health care, the disruptions and distractions of technology, the corruption of politics by money and media, the destruction of meaningful work,  and the struggle of individuals to survive in a world that is ever more divisive, expensive and complex. The very idea that one can buy a farm, live one’s own life,   live at home under their own steam  until the end of their lives seems a remote fantasy. I can hardly bear to hear about the politics I once loved to cover as a reporter. Click on cable news and see the new national identify every day – money, anger, self-interest, rigidity, exclusion of ordinary people from the process.

But I don’t mean to slip into lament or nostalgia. I have a great life, and I believe these values are not gone forever, or gone at all. This man’s meat – my meat – is about the very things White admired. I seek individuality, the joy of self-discovery and am struggling every day for a life of genuine self-reliance and independence from all of the things I am told I must have to live a safe and healthy and secure life.

Another thing I admired about White was the gentle, affectionate, but never overly sentimental way in which he wrote about his dogs. He loved them and had much fun with them and always kept an eye on what it was about them that made us smile, not cry.

I am very grateful – honored –  to be blurbing his book.