Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Wind the Clock, For Tomorrow is Another Day: Letters of Note”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. E.B. White is well known for children’s books like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, as well as lots of essays, but he was also a prolific letter writer. And there’s one from the book Letters of Note, which was compiled by Sean Usher, that I really like and wanted to share. It’s a response to a Mr. Nadeau who wrote E.B. White in 1973. And Mr. Nadeau, whoever he was, was feeling especially pessimistic about the future of the human race. And here’s White’s response to that.
Dear Mr. Nadeau, as long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock as a contribution to order and steadfastness. Sailors have an expression about the weather. They say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society. Things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet.
But as a people, we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that the same traits will enable him to claw his way out. Hang on to your hat, hang on to your hope, and wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Sincerely, E.B. White.
And Grant, I thought, despite the dated references to man doing this and man doing that, I really appreciated this letter, just the hope that he conveyed.
Yeah, and the message is all the more reinforced by the beautiful writing.
Yeah, not a word wasted. He always emphasized that as a writer.
And I think he didn’t waste a word here.
No, and he took care with it to craft a message instead of just saying, you know, buck up, brother. He spent time with this to get it right.
I wonder if E.B. White needed that message as much for himself as he did for his correspondent.
I wonder, because we all have those moments where we feel like, oh, it’s all going to heck in a handbasket.
Yeah.
And there was something I thought really wonderful about how he talks about winding the clock. You know, we don’t do that anymore, but it’s that same idea of just going through the motions. Sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other and do those quotidian things. And as he says, you know, the clouds finally part.
Right, but it’s not just the quotidian things, but the quotidian things that prepare for the coming day with the expectation that it will appear.
Yeah, that’s a really good point.
We’ll share that book, Letters of Note, by Sean Usher on the website.
And if you’ve got something beautiful that you’ve read, a paragraph, a sentence, an idiom, a proverb, we would love to see it so we can share it with others too.
Words at waywordradio.org or call us on the phone. It’s toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673.
