One Man's Meat by E. B. White

Author:E. B. White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

[ September 1940 ]

SANITATION

The good world will be impossible to achieve until parents quit teaching their children about materialism. Children are naturally active and somewhat materialistic, but they are not incurably purposeful. Their activity has a fanciful quality and is harmless although often destructive to property.

We teach our child many things I don’t believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, but I do not honestly think there is any considerable good in punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by example, that the greatest defeat in life was to miss a train. Only after many years did I learn that an escaping train carries away with it nothing vital to my health. Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.

We teach cleanliness, sanitation, hygiene; but I am suspicious of these practices. A child who believes that every scratch needs to be painted with iodine has lost a certain grip on life that he may never regain and has acquired a frailty of spirit that may unfit him for living. The sterile bandage is the flag of modern society, but I notice more and more of them are needed all the time, so terrible are the wars.

We teach our child manners, but the only good manners are those that take shape somewhat instinctively, from a feeling of kinship with, or admiration for, other people who are behaving in a gentle fashion. Manners are a game adults play among themselves and with children to make life easier for themselves, but frequently they do not make life easier but harder. Often a meal hour is given over to the business of enforcing certain standards on a child, who becomes petulant and refractory, as do the parents, and the good goes out of the food and the occasion. It is impossible for a mature person to take manners seriously if he observes how easily they shape themselves to fit the circumstances. Ten or fifteen years ago it was customary in a restaurant to rise when someone approached your table. But when the Pullman-type booth was invented men discovered they couldn’t rise out of their seat without barking their belly on the edge of the table—so they abandoned the rule and kept their seat. This is most revealing. If a man were truly bent on showing respect for ladies he would do so even if it meant upsetting every table in the room.

I teach my child to look at life in a thoroughly materialistic fashion. If he escapes and becomes the sort of person I hope he will become, it will be because he sees through the hokum that I hand out. He already shows signs of it.

I guess there are two reasons for my not interpreting life more honestly for my son. First, it is too hard. (It’s almost a full-time job to interpret life honestly.) Second, if you tell a child about the hollowness of some of the conventions, he will be back in ten minutes using his information against you.

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