On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.”

White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on a tenderness for life with books like Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web — wasted no time polishing the absurd proposition into a lens on the deepest problem facing our civilization.

In one of his wartime editorials for The New Yorker, later collected in the hauntingly timely out-of-print gem The Wild Flag (public library), he writes:

The Pacific Ocean, said Clarence Budington Kelland firmly, must become an American lake. He didn’t make it clear why it should become an American lake rather than, say, a Chinese lake or a Russian lake. The Chinese were seaside dwellers along the Pacific many thousands of years before the Americans, and presumably even now like to gaze upon its blue and sometimes tranquil waters. This may seem annoying to a party leader, who is apt to find it difficult to believe that there can be anybody of any importance on the far end of a lake. Yet the Pacific and its subsidiary seas are presumably real and agreeable to the people who live on them. The Sea of Okhotsk is five times the size of Mr. Kelland’s state of Arizona, the Sea of Japan is longer than the longest serial he ever wrote, the Yellow Sea is as big as the Paramount Building and bigger, and the South China Sea runs on endlessly into the sunset beyond Borneo. Are these the coves in an American lake — little bays where we can go to catch our pickerel among the weeds?

What made Kelland’s postwar plan so preposterous is also what made it so dangerous — it lived by the same metastatic nationalism that had hurled the world into war in the first place. Against this malady humanity’s narrowly evaded self-destruction was evidently only a temporary vaccine that has since worn out: Here we are again, gulfing toward an abyss from which there may be no return.

E.B. White devoted his life to diagnosing the malady in the hope that future generations — that’s us — may arrive at a cure before another metastasis, this one deadly.

A generation before Gary Snyder considered what it would take to unbreak the world, urging us to place “community networks” at the center of how we govern ourselves and work “toward the true community of all beings,” White writes:

The answer to war is no war. And the likeliest means of removing war from the routine of national life is to elevate the community’s authority to a level which is above national level.

When I took the Oath of Allegiance at my naturalization ceremony twenty years after emigrating to America as a lone teenager from a poor post-communist country — an oath natural-born citizens never have to swear — I was taken aback by its demand to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required to do so.

The flag rose and I, standing between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, repeated the words, received my certificate in a daze, and left with an uneasy feeling.

Out in the sterile municipal parking lot, watching a yellow leaf flutter at the tip of an aspen branch, I wondered what the world would look like if this were the flag we all swore allegiance to — this bright burst of life holding onto itself.

E.B. White — who never lost faith in humanity, even as he lived through two world wars and the nuclear terror of the Cold War — wondered the same, observing in another 1943 editorial:

The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet.

And in another:

A nation asks of its citizens everything — their fealty, their money, their faith, their time, their lives. It is fair to ask whether the nation, in return, does indeed any longer serve the best interests of the human beings who give so lavishly of their affections and their blood.

[…]

Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part. This choice is implicit in the world to come. We have a little time in which we can make the choice intelligently. Failing that, the choice will be made for us in the confusion of war, from which the world will emerge unified — the unity of total desolation.

He envisioned a new organizing principle for the world, different from nationalistic government — one that would “impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom — although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.” Imagine if we all viewed our participation in humanity the way astronauts do, how naturally then we would unfist our nationalisms into an outstretched hand. White imagined it, with all the salutary disorientation it would entail:

A world made one, by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would deprive him of the enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he has never seen.

There is, White wrote, already a microcosm of that possibility:

The City of New York is a world government on a small scale. There, truly, is the world in a nutshell, its citizens meeting in the subway and ballpark, sunning on the benches in the square. They shove each other, but seldom too hard. They annoy each other, but rarely to the point of real trouble.

This little aside in the middle of a New Yorker editorial would become the seed for White’s timeless love letter to the city, penned just a few years after the end of the war. In it, he would write:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines… [a] poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

What if we governed human life not by politics but by poetry?

“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” James Baldwin would insist a generation after White — James Baldwin, who also insisted that “the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”

What if the choice White saw a century ago is yet to be made, can be made, fall on us to make? We can choose, we can, to make of this dying planet a living poem.