Next book on my essays bookshelf:
Written in 1956, this essay is about one of E.B. White’s Florida sojourns. He is in Sarasota, and he soaks up all of the differences between Florida climate and a more Northern climate, and because he’s E.B. White, it’s all fascinating. It’s 1956, though, and he is uneasily aware of the segregation of the society he visits, and can’t really get away from it. Everywhere was segregated in America then, but visiting the South from New York would be a reminder of how bad it really was. (Interestingly, Sam Cooke, who hailed from Chicago, was totally horrified by his first experiences traveling with his gospel group through the South. Even in a segregated Chicago, there wasn’t the level of fear he felt in the South.)
E.B. White often started with the micro and moved into the macro. It’s a style thing, something he excelled at. People imitate him when they write essays now and probably don’t even know who they’re imitating. You know, squeezing your morning orange juice leads to a contemplation of the situation in the Ukraine. Whatever. We’ve all read such essays and usually they are extremely self-indulgent, and poorly done. The connections are not made properly, or it tries to put two unequal things on an equal playing field. It prioritizes the writer’s experience, which is irrelevant, really, put alongside big world events. But White’s way of making connections is elegant, thoughtful, and gentle. He makes it sound like he’s just musing out loud. “You know, I was watching the birds build a nest outside and here is what I saw. Then I went back to the kitchen and read the newspaper. The front-page news made me feel this way.” And somehow, gently, invisibly, connections are made. I don’t mean to use the dreaded passive voice, it’s just that you often can’t clock E.B. White on “making connections.” Sometimes you can, and sometimes he does get didactic, but in general, he doesn’t at all. He sticks to the details right in front of his nose.
“The Ring of Time” is a perfect example. Ringling Bros. was holed up in Sarasota, getting ready to go on the road, and one day, he goes to visit. He happens to witness a circus rider rehearsing her act, riding her horse around the ring. And it gets him to thinking about time. Its circular nature, how things move forward, and yet things are also captured in time.
What I love about the following excerpt is how he describes the circus rider, and describes what it meant to him to see her, and he does so in such a way that now I get to have it as a “memory.”
Excerpt from Essays of E. B. White
The ten-minute ride the girl took achieved – as far as I was concerned, who wasn’t looking for it, and quite unbeknownst to her, who wasn’t even striving for it – the thing that is sought by performers everywhere, on whatever stage, whether struggling in the tidal currents of Shakespeare or bucking the difficult motion of a horse. I somehow got the idea she was just cadging a ride, improving a shining ten minutes in the diligent way all serious artists seize free moments to hone the blade of their talent and keep themselves in trim. Her brief tour included only elementary postures and tricks, perhaps because they were all she was capable of, perhaps because her warmup at this hour was unscheduled and the ring was not rigged for a real practice session. She swung herself off and on the horse several times, gripping his mane. She did a few knee-stands – or whatever they are called – dropping to her knees and quickly bouncing back up on her feet again. Most of the time she simply rode in a standing position, well aft on the beast, her hands hanging easily at her sides, her head erect, her straw-colored ponytail lightly brushing her shoulders, the blood of exertion showing faintly through the tan of her skin. Twice she managed a one-foot stance – a sort of ballet pose, with arms outstretched. At one point the neck strap of her bathing suit broke and she went twice around the ring in the classic attitude of a woman making minor repairs to a garment. The fact that she was standing on the back of a moving horse while doing this invested the matter with a clownish significance that perfectly fitted the spirit of the circus – jocund, yet charming. She just rolled the strap into a neat ball and stowed it inside her bodice while the horse rocked and rolled beneath her in dutiful innocence. The bathing suit proved as self-reliant as its owner and stood up well enough without benefit of strap.
The richness of the scene was in its plainness, its natural condition – of horse, of ring, of girl, even to girl’s bare feet that gripped the bare back of her proud and ridiculous mount. The enchantment grew not out of anything that happened or was performed but out of something that seemed to go round and around and around with the girl, attending her, a steady gleam in the shape of a circle – a ring of ambition, of happiness, of youth. (And the positive pleasures of equilibrium under difficulties.) In a week or two, all would be changed, all (or almost all) lost: the girl would wear makeup, the horse would wear gold, the ring would be painted, the bark would be clean for the feet of the horse, the girl’s feet would be clean for the slippers that she’d wear. All, all would be lost.
As I watched with the others, our jaws adroop, our eyes alight, I became painfully conscious of the element of time. Everything in the hideous old building seemed to take the shape of a circle, conforming to the course of the horse. The rider’s gaze, as she peered straight ahead, seemed to be circular, as though bent by force of circumstance; then time itself began running in circles, and so the beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same, and one thing ran into the next and time went round and around and got nowhere. The girl wasn’t so young that she did not know the delicious satisfaction of having a perfectly behaved body and the fun of using it to do a trick most people can’t do, but she was too young to know that time does not really move in a circle at all. I thought: “She will never be as beautiful as this again” – a thought that made me acutely unhappy – and in a flash my mind (which is too much of a busybody to suit me) had projected her twenty-five years ahead, and she was now in the center of the ring, on foot, wearing a conical hat and high-heeld shoes, the image of the older woman, holding the long rein, caught in the treadmill of an afternoon long in the future. “She is at that enviable moment in life [I thought] when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start.” Everything in her movements, her expression, told you that for her the ring of time was perfectly formed, changeless, predictable, without beginning or end, like the ring in which she was traveling at this moment with the horse that wallowed under her. And then I slipped back into my trance, and time was circular again – time, pausing quietly with the rest of us, so as not to disturb the balance of a performer.
Her ride ended as casually as it had begun. The older woman stopped the horse, and the girl slid to the ground. As she walked toward us to leave, there was a quick, small burst of applause. She smiled broadly, in surprise and pleasure; then her face suddenly regained its gravity and she disappeared through the door.
It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him. At any rate, it is worth reporting that long before the circus comes to town, its most notable performances have already been given. Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources – from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.
