Once More to the Lake

Contributor to The New Yorker and author of top children’s novel Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White, relives the lakefront father-son memories in his personal essay “Once More to the Lake”. As he is visiting Belgrade, Maine, with his son, he finds pleasure in reminiscing about the childhood memories he experienced with his own father there. White juxtaposes his memories of the lake as a child to his observations as a grown man. In one instance he compares the sounds of the boats there. He describes the modern boats as making an “unfamiliar nervous sound” and the boats from his childhood as “sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep”. With White’s interwoven imagery throughout the narrative, the vivid memories of the lake are brought to life. He recounts the early mornings, “when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen”. Most importantly, the description in “Once More to the Lake” is able to picture the cycle of life, which is White’s purpose. When his son and he are fishing, he says, "I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of". It intends to show the audience, specifically parents, how people pass through life. One day we are here and one day we are gone. The parent to child relationship in this essay perfectly demonstrates this concept of life. When White is watching his son put on his swim trunks in the closing sentences, he ends, “As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death”. Seeing himself in his son and his father in himself, he comes to a realization of his own mortality in life’s cycle.

“Revival at the Lake” A thunderstorm “linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain”. (channelstv.com)