(Originally posted at Greater Democracy)

I am sitting at a beach house out on Cape Cod. Half the family has gone out whale watching and the other half is still sleeping. We spent much of yesterday at the beach, playing in the sand and the waves. It seems like a perfect setting for reading E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat. It is a collection of essays that White wrote while living on a saltwater farm in Maine during World War II.

In the foreword, his stepson, Roger Angell writes, “Who amongst us can be certain that when another time as vivid and dangerous sweeps us up we will find an E. B. White somewhere to talk to us in these quiet and compelling tones?” While I may be a long way from being an E. B. White in what seems to me to be another vivid and dangerous time, I do strive for his tone.

This morning, I read White reflecting on the war coverage of Hendrick van Loon. White writes, “I have liked his reports on the day’s events because he has made them seem like part of a whole, not like an isolated moment in time.” It has seemed to me that much of the coverage of 9/11, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq, and this year’s presidential election has been ‘breaking news’, isolated in this post turn of the millennium moment.