5 ideas
In 1941 White took his son to the Maine lake where his own father had brought him every August since 1904. There he kept feeling that he was the boy and his son was him: the same dragonfly settled on the same fishing rod. The essay ends when his son pulls on a cold, wet swimsuit after a thunderstorm, and White writes: 'suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.'
When a scene repeats almost exactly across generations, you slide into the role of the one who came before. For White, that meant becoming his own father. Recognizing that you are now the older figure makes your death concrete in the body rather than abstract in the mind. The small differences that break the illusion are what date you.
In 'Death of a Pig', White bought a spring pig to fatten and butcher, the normal farm routine. When it fell ill he nursed it desperately, dosing it with castor oil and giving it enemas. When it died he grieved it as a friend. The planned tragedy of slaughter was replaced by an unplanned one, and he wrote the account 'in penitence' for failing a creature he had meant to kill.
In 'Here Is New York', White divides the city into three populations. There are the natives, who take it for granted. There are the commuters, who use it by day and leave at night. There are the settlers, born elsewhere and arrived in pursuit of something. He argues that the settlers supply the city's passion, and that people who came by choice set a place's intensity and character.
In his foreword, White says the essayist is a self-liberated person. The essayist is sustained by 'the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.' The form lets the writer be any kind of person, from philosopher to scold to clown. Its authority comes from honest personal candor rather than from expertise.