Once More To The Lake By E. B White Summary

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Accepting mortality as an inevitable part of life is an obstacle that every must undertake at some time in his or her life. Author E.B. White encounters such a struggle in his essay “Once More to the Lake”, in which he recalls taking his son to a lake retreat in Maine that his father took him to every first week of August in his youth. During the trip, White sees the lake through his son’s eyes but notices variations in the environment as a result of time. He begins to feel more like his father as he watches his son, but has trouble accepting that he, just like the lake, is changing and aging as time passes on. White embarks on his trip with his son “who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train…show more content…
When eating dinner at the farmhouse, he notes that “the girls who served dinner were the same farm girls but their hair had been washed . . . they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair” (White), indicating that their level of maturity and worldliness had increased and become a part of their daily lives. White contrasts the sounds on the lake from his childhood with the present ones when mentioning a boating trip with his son: “In the old days the boats were powered by inboards “and when they were at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep. . . But now the campers all had outboards and these made a petulant, irritable sound” (White), which displays his inability to accept the technological changes that come around with time, in places that felt very remote in his youth. As White walks down the wharf with his son, he mentions “I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants” (White), showing that although he wishes to relive the entire trip through his son, he is gaining a sense of awareness that he is an individual in a different position than in his past and his environment has also undergone change due to
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