I do not read at length but in spurts until, gorged with thought, I itch to write – or sleep, to ready myself to write.

This is a report, not a recommendation. There is no wrong way to read. Our world would be saner, I’m convinced, if more read, for reading is thinking, brainwork, discarding the discreditable as it stares back at us from the page with mute reproach: “Is this what you really think?”

I used to read at length – hefty Victorian tales, Proust, Thomas Mann. Pages turned. I wanted to read everything, know the old makers. I gave them the time they asked, respectful, not impatient. Time’s more easily allowed when you imagine you’ve ample. Now I am impatient, the hourglass draining – and I’ve more to say than in my younger years. Whether what I have to say has to be said is more than I know, only that expression feels urgent, as if I were once again scribbling frantically in the blue exam book before “Pencils up.”

Reading made me a writer; now writing crowds out reading. If only we had time! But in a passionately lived life, time’s what we do not have.

Just now I’ve been rereading E.B. (known as Andy) White. A cherished reader pressed him on me as the paragon to emulate. I remembered him from a lifetime ago with admiration but not adulation, a lesser Thoreau, an impeccable stylist but without Thoreau’s proselytizing urgency. Thoreau sought to persuade, White to ingratiate, different missions. White’s happy – and hopes we are – and wants to share his happiness – but not discomfit us. Recounting his life with exquisite exactitude, he spares us any inspection of our own. Thoreau, by contrast, intimidates like a fiery preacher. Will we be numbered among the saved, those who lived life fully and drank it to its lees?

My cherished reader was right: reading White is a pleasure. Colorful careful considerate prose is so uncommon I cotton to any producer, whether or not I concur with their conclusions. White is unfailingly genial. But for me – a curious caveat – he is often too nice, excising from his essays the pain of their production. He reminds me of a cheerful new mom who insists parturition was no big deal, piece of cake. We feel excluded from her actuality: that can’t possibly be true!

Sometimes, though, White dares “something more of the depths,” to borrow Frost’s phrase. A light-hearted jeu d’esprit suddenly takes on the coloration of tragedy. His essay “Bedfellows” is such an accomplishment. You can find it here in any format: a dozen dollars were never better spent.

The cranky author, confined to bed with a bad cold, is reading the day’s news, musing about three Democrats (Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and Dean Acheson – Republican Ike would join them later). His confinement reminds him of a time, now long since, when his dachshund Fred would have been there too. Fred and Andy had a feisty relation like a quarrelsome old couple who’d never dream of divorce. Andy recalls especially Fred’s smell, almost a stench, but one which gladdened him. How his memories of Fred intermingle and interact with the Democrats (and one Republican) and musings on prayer, I leave you to discover; for a guy who fusses with this form, White’s wiles are as daring as they are elevating.

I retype the essay’s final two paragraphs, without copyright permission, to give you a flavor. I’m guessing Andy’s ghost will forgive this homage. (Homage is easy to forgive.)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedOne day last fall I wandered down through the orchard and into the woods to pay a call at Fred’s grave. The trees were bare; wild apples hung shamelessly from the grapevine that long ago took over the tree. The old dump, which is no longer used and goes out of sight during the leafy months, lay exposed and candid – rusted pots and tin cans and sundries. The briers had lost some of their effectiveness, the air was good, and the little dingle, usually so mean and inconsiderable, seemed to have acquired stature. Fred’s headstone, ordinarily in collapse, was bolt upright, and I wondered whether he had quieted down at last. I felt uneasy suddenly, as the quick do sometimes feel when in the presence of the dead, and my uneasiness went to my bladder. Instead of laying a wreath, I watered an alder and went away.

This grave is the only grave I visit with any regularity – in fact, it is the only grave I visit at all. I have relatives lying in cemeteries here and there around the country, but I do not feel any urge to return to them, and it strikes me as odd that I should return to the place where an old dog lies in a shabby bit of woodland next to a private dump. Besides being an easy trip (one for which I need make no preparations) it is a natural journey – I really go down there to see what’s doing. (Fred himself used to scout the place every day when he was alive.) I do not experience grief when I am down there, nor do I pay tribute to the dead. I feel an overall sadness that has nothing to do with the grave or its occupant. Often I feel extremely well in that rough cemetery, and sometimes flush a partridge. But I feel sadness at All Last Things, too, which is probably a purely selfish, or turned-in, emotion – sorrow not at my dog’s death but at my own, which hasn’t even occurred yet but which saddens me just to think about in such pleasant surroundings.