One Man's Meat

I finally finished E.B. White's One Man's Meat, and now I don't know what to do with myself. I was really sad to leave it. I dreaded the last page and made a little "Awww . . ." sound as I turned to it. I wanted more!

I've been reading it at lunch time over my sack lunches and cafeteria salads. White's essays on country life are so calming, so rejuvenating, and he somehow made subjects like patriotism and World War Two and freedom feel immediate and fresh and important. His essays created a truly quiet space in the middle of my work days; they seemed to clean out my brain for a little bit, sort of smoothing down its rough edges before I took out my notebook for my mid-day writing session.

Finishing a beloved book is a sad event, and also an exciting one. I get to choose a new book now, with a great deal of apprehension (will it live up to White's essays?) and a little bit of hope (could it possibly be even better than White's essays?!).

I think that I'll stick with essays at lunch time. They seem suited to the noon-hour. Poems, which are all impression, emotion, and instinct, seem right for foggy-headed mornings, and novels are purely evening fare, with their human camaraderie and thrilling imaginative leaps. But the honesty of non-fiction, the way that essays inch their way from fact toward wisdom, is steadying and filling, sort of like a turkey sandwich on whole grain bread.

So what's next? Hmmm . . . here are the possibilities:

1. Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
2. Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem
3. Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Other Essays
5. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
6. Marilynn Robinson's Absence of Mind 

Any suggestions?