![]() ![]() I was allergic to platforms, and still am. I was, as a child, allergic to pollens and dusts, and still am. I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood: fear of the dark, fear of the future, fear of the return to school after a summer on a lake in Maine, fear of making an appearance on a platform, fear of the lavatory in the school basement where the slate urinals cascaded, fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about. We lived in a large house in a leafy suburb, where there were backyards and stables and grape arbors. My mother was loving, hardworking, and retiring. My father was formal, conservative, successful, hardworking, and worried. We were a large family (six children) and were a small kingdom unto ourselves. White has this to say about himself:Īs a child, I was frightened but not unhappy. ![]() In a Paris Review “Art of the Essay” interview, Mr. White was remembered as shy and reserved. “Elwyn,” as he was eventually dubbed “Andy,” a nickname given to any male with the last name “White” who happened to be matriculating through Cornell University at the time, in honor of the university’s founder, Andrew White. B.” in his name stands for “Elwyn Brooks.” Thankfully, the universe mercifully decided against calling ol’ E.B. White that I discovered after entering his name into a search engine. “I think people think it's old-fashioned, which is a shame, because it's really, really good.”īefore I talk about “Once More to the Lake,” let me talk about some things about E. “You might overestimate how many of them have read it,” he said. Moreover, the essay’s ubiquitous appearance in dozens 20th century lit anthologies made me presume that undergrads in a creative writing class would surely have encountered it before and might roll their eyes at the idea of being asked to read it again (not that they wouldn’t roll their eyes no matter what I assigned). The arcane diction of its title had always struck me overly wistful, a phrase that might be spoken by a pensive aristocrat in a film from the 1940s: Let us go then, you and I… Once more to the lake. Even though I’d only read it a time or two, it felt like an overly familiar choice-traditional, maybe even a bit stuffy. In fact, if the anthology in question included a section on “Personal Essays,” you could bet that “Once More to the Lake” would appear there. White’s “Once More to the Lake.” Boring, I wrote back, not because I’d read it recently but because I’d remembered having seen it in so many anthologies over the years, especially those that I’d used when teaching freshman composition. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen.When I asked my friend Kevin Moffett, author of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, if he had any suggestions about the kinds of essays I should assign for a Creative Nonfiction class, he suggested E. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out, and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot-the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I took my son, who had never had fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from the train windows. Read the following excerpt from "Once More to the Lake" by E. ![]()
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