Five years wide awake

"Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me ... I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper."

From One Man’s Meat, E.B. White’s collection of essays written for Harper’s Magazine, in a foreword written 40 years after its initial publication, in 1942. He moved to a “salt-water farm’’ in Brooklin, Maine, in 1938 from New York City (where he frequently returned to work at The New Yorker in stints). The farm most famously inspired the classic children’s (and adults’) book Charlotte’s Web.