Response to E.B. White's "The Ring of Time"

The ring of time—those moments when time acts differently than time as we understand it, linear and irreversible. Time seems to stand still because it “[begins] running in circles, and so the beginning [is] where the end was, and the two [are] the same, and one thing [runs] into the next and time [goes] round and around and [gets] nowhere” (540). E.B. White makes such observations while watching a circus performer practice, attempting to describe something we all somehow intuitively understand but can hardly explain with words, the behaviors and effects of time. He admits failure in the essay but says that as “a writer, like an acrobat, [he] must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him” (541). I like this image. Writing is thus naturally humbling, an opportunity to practice this difficult fruit of the spirit.

But White tries again to explain this ring of time in the next section. He compares the South, stuck in cycles of racism, to those moments when time seems to stop. But instead of admitting failure at the end of this section, he confronts the true nature of time—that “the only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change” (544), which comes with the inevitable passing of time. The ring is an oxymoronic impossibility but still exists as a “worldly or unworldly enchantment” (539). The ring’s magic is like the circus’s magic, “universal and complex” (539).

I think the P.S. rearticulates the sobering conclusion that “time has not stood still for anybody but the dead, and even the dead must be able to hear the acceleration of little sports cars and know that things have changed.” Although sobering, this claim cannot withstand those unusual moments of time transcendence.