Your Humble Reader had one of those disorienting moments recently, when a thing thought to be true turns out not to be true. I had always thought that I liked E.B. White’s Stuart Little more than Charlotte’s Web, but it turns out the other way around. It’s not just that, having re-read them both in the last five years, I now enjoy the pig and spider story more than the mouse and bird one, but that much of what I remember liking about Stuart Little turns out not to actually be from that book, and much of what is in the book I don’t recall at all. I’ve gotten it confused with The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and probably with the town-mouse and the country-mouse, and with the Tale of Two Bad Mice, and some other things as well. Not that Stuart Little is a bad book—the boat race is terrific—but it isn’t the book I remembered.
Charlotte’s Web, on the other hand, is pretty much exactly the book I remembered, only of course there is more to it than I thought there was. Yes, it’s a sweet and sad book about friendship and death, but the primary point seems to be extolling farm life to city folk. Or, rather, dreaming about farm life. It struck me as being like Monet’s Water Lillies in a way, an escape for city people who will never farm. A packaged and beautified farm, for city kids to visit in their heads, as a respite. I’m a city boy myself, of course, and it works for me. It makes me wistful, it makes me think that farm life would be simpler, and more honest somehow, and better.
Of course, after I close the book, I realize that country life is full of dirt and spiders and bugs of all kinds, and birds making an unholy racket at dawn, and no pizza delivery or coffeehouses. Which is fine; Mr. White doesn’t actually want us to flee the city and buy a farm, the way he did. He just wants us (particularly our children) to want to, just for a few minutes.
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-Vardibidian.