During a break from the archives in Madison last month, I went wandering through the cobbledy streets of shops near the campus until I found a secondhand bookstore that reminded me of one I used to frequent in New Orleans. (I can't remember the name of either one, of course, and the similarities were probably exacerbated by the deep humidity of August in Madison.) The place was under the watch of two spaniels, who also closely monitored their owner as she reshelved and resold and frowned. The shelves rose well above my head and were arranged in narrow corridors that seemed to completely envelope browsers. I rummaged around until I found a short stack of E.B. White and Virginia Woolf, and left with White’s Writings from the New Yorker 1927-1976, a biography of Himself, and A Room of One’s Own. I adore White. And I am determined once again to try to like Woolf, having failed miserably on many previous attempts. (I am fond of Street Haunting. But that’s one essay among many read, as well as Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and Mrs. Dalloway.)

I am procrastinating with the Woolf, of course, and so my bedtime reading these last few nights has been White’s Writings. It occurs to me to start running the E.B. White Quote Blog, but that would be excessive. Instead I will limit myself to this one short, Save the Grizzlies, which is for Steve.

A committee has approached us to ask if we would help in the work of protecting and preserving the brown and grizzly bears of Alaska. Need we say we will? Once we spent six weeks in Alaska, and although we never happened to have an opportunity to protect a grizzly from the predatory old paper-pulp interests, which threaten their extinction, we always stood ready to. We are still ready. The islands of the Inside Passage, where the bears live, seemed to us lovely, perfect. We should not want one of them changed by the extinction of so much as one bear, or the establishment of even one pulp mill. Grizzlies are certainly less dangerous than the tabloids that are printed from paper pulp.

Of course it is our ill fortune always to see both sides of every question. The letter from the Committee on Protection and Preservation of Alaska Brown and Grizzly Bears was written, we notice, on paper. In other words, the Committee are using paper in their campaign against paper pulp. We think they really out to send out their communications on parchment, preferably made from the hides of sheep especially killed for the purpose by grizzly bears. You see? We’re no good in any cause. Too open-minded.

[1/29/32]