Analysis Of Once More To The Lake By E. B. White

In a world of digitally edited photography and Photoshop masters, Polaroid pictures have once more become a trend. The instantaneous image of life unabridged appeals because it refuses to portray life through any rose-colored or edited lens, instead allowing memory to appreciate the sanctity of returning to a moment lost. However, through this nostalgia, the brain crops and edits the photograph just as one would on a computer, freezing the moment in memory as better, brighter, and more beautiful than it ever was in life. E. B. White reflects upon this phenomenon in his memoir “Once More to the Lake,” elaborating upon the nature of time, memory, and the human’s perception of reality. Through a heartfelt story about his experience at a lake with …show more content…
Throughout the piece he plays upon various dualities, most stemming from his inability to distinguish himself from his son. He writes that upon seeing his son fishing, he felt as though “it was [his] hands that held the rod, [his] eyes watching… and [that he] didn’t know which rod [he] was at the end of.” This juxtaposition allows him to simultaneously describe the philosophies of childhood and adulthood — the younger content with the experience at hand, the older wishing to relive experiences lost, and thus losing the ones in the present. He continues to emphasize this difference in outlooks and resultant discrepancies in appreciating the present through verb tense. White reflects that there “had been jollity and peace and goodness” and continues to employ the past tense when describing his experiences at the lake. The syntactical move creates the unspoken conclusion that since there once had been, something is now lost, revealing the nostalgic aches of adulthood and illustrating the struggle of trying to live in the past. However, White then writes that “peace and goodness and jollity” still exist upon the late, but even the rotation of the nouns allows him to express the duality. What to children is happiness, to adults is peace, and what to children is a chance to live, to adults is a chance to relive. Furthermore, he cites modern hindrances to …show more content…
While nostalgic memory undoubtedly serves benefits humans, allowing for a nearness to times long gone, the point at which it interrupts daily life is its healthy limit. Regardless of the number of Polaroid pictures we dutifully take and save as reminders of our “glory days,” E. B. White reminds us that the chill of death comes suddenly and unapologetically, so it is better to have lived in the present than lingered in the