# E.B. White Security help!



## howrsegirl123 (Feb 19, 2012)

Could someone please explain E.B. White's Security to me? I understand all of it except the last part. 

It was a fine clear day for the fair this year, and I went up early to see how the Ferris wheel was doing and to take a ride. It pays to check up on Ferris wheels these days: by noting the volume of business one can get some idea which side is ahead in the world—whether the airborne freemen outnumber the earthbound slaves. It was encouraging to discover that there were still quite a few people at the Fair who preferred a feeling of high, breezy insecurity to one of solid support. My friend, Healy, surprised me by declining to go aloft; he is an unusually cautious man, however—even his hat was insured. 

I like to watch the faces of the people who are trying to get up the nerve to take to the air. You see them at the ticket booths in amusement parks, in the waiting rooms at the airport. Within them two irreconcilables are at war—the desire for safety, the yearning for a dizzy release. My Britannica tells nothing about Mr. G.W. G. Ferris, but he belongs with the immortals. From the top of the wheel, seated beside a small boy, windswept and fancy free, I looked down on the Fair and for a moment was alive. Below us the old harness drivers pushed their trotters round the dirt track, old men with their legs still sticking out stiffly round the rumps of horses. And from the cluster of loud speakers atop the judges’ stand came the “Indian Love Call,” bathing heaven and ear in jumbo tenderness.

This silvery wheel, revolving in the cause of freedom, was only just holding its own, I soon discovered; for farther along the midway, in a sideshow tent, a tattoo artist, was doing a land-office business, not with anchors, flags, or pretty mermaids, but with Social Security Numbers, neatly pricked on your forearm with the electric needle. He had plenty of customers, mild-mannered, pale men, asking glumly for the sort of indelible ignominy that was once reserved for prisoners and beef cattle. Drab times these, when the bravado and the exhibitionism are gone from tattooing and it becomes simply a branding operation. I hope the art that produced the bird’s eye view of Sydney will not be forever lost in the routine business of putting serial numbers on people who are worried about growing old.

The sight would have depressed me had I not soon won a cane by knocking over three cats with three balls. There is no moment when a man so surely has the world by the tail as when he strolls down the midway swinging a prize cane.


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## jaydee (May 10, 2012)

What is it exactly that you don't understand?


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## howrsegirl123 (Feb 19, 2012)

The last few lines.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## howrsegirl123 (Feb 19, 2012)

Like what is he trying to say?
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## jaydee (May 10, 2012)

That he found a lot of the sights of the fairground depressing but the fact that he won a prize at the end made him feel so good that it wiped all of that from his mind and he left feeling happy
I guess he was a huge fan of canes!!!


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## howrsegirl123 (Feb 19, 2012)

I have to talk about what Plato would think of those last lines.
I'm comparing Plato's Allegory of the Cave to this.


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## jaydee (May 10, 2012)

That's a tough one
I can see the Fairground as a "false reality' - because that's what those places are all about - the glitzy fake exterior that hides the depressing shabbiness beneath it. 
The escapee from the cave goes back with a new vision of reality but the man from the fairground really doesn't - his joy at winning the prize has glossed over the truths he was seeing.


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## howrsegirl123 (Feb 19, 2012)

jaydee said:


> That's a tough one
> I can see the Fairground as a "false reality' - because that's what those places are all about - the glitzy fake exterior that hides the depressing shabbiness beneath it.
> The escapee from the cave goes back with a new vision of reality but the man from the fairground really doesn't - his joy at winning the prize has glossed over the truths he was seeing.


Thank you. This helped.
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## tinyliny (Oct 31, 2009)

It would have helped me tremendously to understand what you were talking about if you'd said, *E. B. White's "Security"* or * E. B. White's Security*

I assume that "Security" is the title of a book or essay? Then, if you are quoting directly from the book, you need to put quotes around it. I am not trying to be a nitpicker, but I could not make heads nor tails out of your first post, due to the lack of correct punctuation. Who would ever guess that punctuation could be so important.


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