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February 18, 2008
E.B. White on information overload
One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to do something about the scores of unread books I have stacked throughout my home and office: either read them or donate them (or read them AND donate them; the point is to reduce the number).
So I picked up a copy of One Man’s Meat, the 1944 collection of essays by E.B. White about his experiences on a farm in coastal Maine. Mr. White is today best known for his children’s books (including Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little) and for editing The Elements of Style, but during his long writing career, he also wrote nonfiction for The New Yorker for six decades.
One Man’s Meat is a terrific book: well-written and an evocative portrait of what life was like in rural Maine in the 1930s and 1940s.
My favorite was a short essay called “Incoming Basket” from August 1938. Even though the piece was written decades before the term “information overload” was ever coined, Mr. White perfectly describes the phenomenon.
He writes about setting up a desk at his farmhouse in Maine. “(It) looked incomplete when I got it set up, so I found a wire basket and put that on it, and threw a few things in it. This basket, however, gave me a lot of trouble for the first couple of weeks. I had always had two baskets in New York. One said IN, the other OUT . . . Here, with only one basket, my problem was to decide whether it was IN or OUT, a decision a person of some character could have made promptly and reasonably but which I fooled round with for days . . . trying to combine the best features of both and using it as a catch-all for migratory papers no matter which way they were headed. This last was disastrous. I found a supposedly out-going letter buried for a week under some broadsides from the local movie house.
“The basket is now IN. I discovered by test that fully ninety per cent of whatever was on my desk at any given moment were IN things. Only ten per cent were OUT things—almost too few to warrant a special container. This, in general, must be true of other people’s lives, too. It is the reason lives get so cluttered up—so many things (except money) filtering in, so few things (except strength) draining out. The phenomenon is difficult for me to understand and has not been explained, to my knowledge, by physicists: how is that, with a continuous interchange of goods or “things” between people, everybody can have more coming in (except money) than going out (except strength).”
Great stuff—made me happy. The bad news is that I’m keeping the book (IN) instead of donating it (OUT).
Posted by Alison Davis at February 18, 2008 12:21 PM