E.B. White's essay "Progress and Change" first appeared in Harper's magazine in February 1939 and was reprinted in the collection One Man's Meat (Harper & Row, 1944). After commenting on the gradual disappearance of the Pullman berth (a small sleeping compartment in trains), White offers this reflection on the "dim degeneracy" that often accompanies progress. He draws his examples from the workroom and spring at his farm in North Brooklin, Maine.
To learn more about the author, visit Writers on Writing: E.B. White.
from "Progress and Change"
by E.B. White (1899-1985)
In resenting progress and change, a man lays himself open to censure. I suppose the explanation of anyone’s defending anything as rudimentary and cramped as a Pullman berth is that things are associated with an earlier period in one’s life and that this period in retrospect seems a happy one. People who favor progress and improvements are apt to be people who have had a tough enough time without any extra inconveniences. Reactionaries who pout at innovations are apt to be well-heeled sentimentalists who had the breaks. Yet for all that, there is always a subtle danger in life’s refinements, a dim degeneracy in progress. I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it. Half a man’s life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process. There was a fine natural spring of water on this place when I bought it. Our drinking water had to be lugged in a pail, from a wet glade of alder and tamarack. I visited the spring often in those first years, and had friends there--a frog, a woodcock, and an eel which had churned its way all the way up through the pasture creek to enjoy the luxury of pure water. In the normal course of development, the spring was rocked up, fitted with a concrete curb, a copper pipe, and an electric pump. I have visited it only once or twice since. This year my only gesture was the purely perfunctory one of sending a sample to the state bureau of health for analysis. I felt cheap, as though I were smelling an old friend’s breath.
Selected Works by E.B. White
- Every Day Is Saturday, essays (1934)
- Quu Vadimus? or, The Case for the Bicycle, essays and stories (1939)
- One Man's Meat, essays (1944)
- Stuart Little, fiction (1945)
- Charlotte's Web, fiction (1952)
- The Second Tree From the Corner, essays and stories (1954)
- The Elements of Style, with William Strunk (1959)
- Essays of E.B. White (1977)
- Writings from The New Yorker, essays (1990)
