Once More To The Lake

Section 025

Summary of “Once More To The Lake”

Feeling Of a Visit To The Lake

E. B. White’s work is an autobiographical essay in which he recalls the different moments of his life to the lake, a meaningful place for him. Indeed, White reminisces the pleasant time when his entire family used to go to there each month of August. He describes the lake in Maine as a placid and rich place. Also, the author expresses the jollity, the goodness and the peace of his childhood there and uses imageries for recalling how wonderful were the activities like camping, fishing, and swimming he used to do before. White further recounts that in this place, he had explored the relationship between father and son, and as a custom, he took his son with him and together they went to the lake once more. Therefore, he recalls how so many of the details he now experiences with his son are the same as those he experienced with his father a generation ago; the lake offered a connection to his own father. That’s why he got the illusion to be his father, and by transposition, his son was him (White, 24). In fact, he often describes recent experiences and then relates them closely to his past experiences which bring up seemingly forgotten old memories he had thought lost. White mentions that he cannot at times distinguish the memory from the current experience. For him, the lake never changed; he could find some things that appeared exactly like before, with the same activities too in spite of the passage of the time.

White uses literary techniques such as imagery, metaphor, and a nostalgic tone to illustrate comparisons that contribute to this essay's theme. He reflects a feeling of reverence, appreciation that leads him to think that all is timeless, constant and unchanging as though it brought him comfort to believe that he is still young. However, even though the lake remains unchanged, White was aware that is subject to the natural cycle of birth, childhood, maturity, and death, and he accepts it. For him, like his father, he will die and will become just another memory.

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