A bit of history: in 1938 E. B. White quit his job at The New Yorker and moved his family to a farm on the coast of Maine, where he was to live a dual existence as subsistence farmer and writer. For the next five years he chronicled this double life in a series of articles for Harper’s Magazine; these were subsequently collected and published in a single volume, titled One Man’s Meat, that been continuously in print since 1944.

In 2000 my husband and I, after several years in New York and Chicago, moved to the hills of western Massachusetts. We bought a house surrounded by woods, in a town with a population of 700. Not long after that I found a copy of One Man’s Meat in a used-bookstore. I’d long been a fan of White’s books for children, and thought I’d find some resonance in his city-mouse-in-rural-New-England tales, so of course I bought it. Not until this winter did I get around to reading it, and his essays resonate indeed – but not in the way I’d expected.

The above quote comes at the end of an essay almost exclusively concerned with matters of financial security in small towns in the last years of the Depression. White touches on the cost of raising turkeys, the career paths favored by local high school girls (more and more aspired to be airline hostesses), and the popularity of a tattoo artist at the county fair, who helpfully tattooed people’s social security numbers on their forearms so they would not forget them and be deprived of their benefits. That last detail, with its unwitting foreshadow of the Holocaust, all but leaps off the page, but it’s the remark about "purging" the henhouse that chilled me. Like the comment on lightning in an essay about moving to Maine, or passing references to France and fascism in a piece that centers on a Sunday Sabbath radio broadcast in early 1939, that bit about the henhouse struck a nerve.

White is an unusually prescient writer no matter what topic he takes up. Having seen a demonstration of television, he prophesies that "television is going to be the test of the modern world….We shall stand or fall by television" – but he worries that people will "forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote," in that the world we see on television will come to seem more important and more real than the world we see around us. Elsewhere he muses on the impact of the automobile on American society, the strange shrinking of the world brought about by radio and long-distance telephony, and his conviction that what he refers to as "multinationalism" (countries banding together for the common good) is a prerequisite for future peace. He is always an engaging writer, witty and personable, drawing the reader in with elegant prose that suggests sincerity of purpose mixed with a healthy sense of humor.

In his often whimsical short essays, White is ostensibly concerned with the subject of life in his small New England town. Yet he keeps glancing over his shoulder, tracking events on the other side of the world with a wary concern that grows until it overwhelms his apparent subject matter. He writes of day-to-day tasks, the greater meaning of small actions, and it’s a pleasant world he depicts, but all the while one senses that dark forces are on the move – far away, perhaps, and not affecting White directly, but they’re coming for him and his way of life, and he knows it. Even last summer, this sense of danger would have seemed dated and quaint.

Not anymore. While television and telecommunications have made the world ever smaller, and while we get more multinational all the time, large passages of One Man’s Meat could be published as op-ed pieces today and nobody would suspect the text wasn’t recent. Consider White’s comment in November 1941, when the United States was building up local defense programs:

Or these words, written three days after Pearl Harbor:

Sound familiar? After months of being on a heightened state of alert, it’s downright startling to come across remarks like these in a sixty-year-old book – the more so when reviews of that book make no mention of its life-during-wartime aspects. Presumably those aspects aren’t so prominent for a peacetime reader; for the reader of today, they effectively hijack the manuscript.

And if read with that in mind, One Man’s Meat becomes an ardent and sobering guidebook for those of us trying to live our day-to-day lives now. White gracefully captures the conflicting emotions that arise in times like these: he loves his country but is deeply suspicious of nationalism; he abhors war but believes it must be fought and won if there is ever to be real peace. He speaks admiringly of his fellow Americans’ zeal to defend their country, but after an instance of anti-Semitism goes unnoticed in his town, states that "[t]here would never be a moment, in war or in peace, when I wouldn’t trade all the patriots in the country for one tolerant man." Ultimately his greatest loyalty is to freedom, and he takes any restriction on anyone’s freedom as a personal affront – as well he should. "I am in love with freedom," he announces; "it is an affair of long standing and…it is a fine state to be in." According to the proverb, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, but I believe if more people were to try E. B. White’s diet, we’d have a better and safer world.