Once more to the lake
Teaching objectives
To appreciate the author’s artistic beauty in plain language
To introduce essay as a literary type
Key teaching points
The artistic conception the author creates
Teaching procedures
 About the author
Leading American essayist and literary stylist of his time. White was known for his
crisp, graceful, relaxed style. "No one can write a sentence like White," James Thurber
once stated. White's stories ranged from satire to children's fiction. While he often wrote
from the perspective of slightly ironic onlooker, he also was a sensitive spokesman for the
freedom of the individual. Among his most enduring essays is 'Once More to the Lake.'
 About the essay “Once More to the Lake”
“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White was an essay in which a father struggles to
find himself. The essay is about a little boy and his father. They go to a lake where the
father had been in his childhood years. The father looks back at those years and tries to
relive the moments through his son's eyes. He knows he can't, and has difficulty dealing
with the fact that he can't go back in time. E.B. White's way of letting the reader know
that the father is in a way depressed, is through great detail and description. The story
mentions how the lake has changes since the father had seen it last. How the once gravel
roads have been paved over, and the sail boats are now replace with boats with outboard
motors. As the reader, one can sense a feeling of how the father isn't able to adapt to these
changes. The little boy in the story, the son, also doesn't seem to appreciate the lake as
much as the father did when he was growing up. Like how when he was a boy, he would
wake up early to fish. Now the father wishes his son would do the same. It seemed the
little boy just too the trip for granted. He didn't appear to be as appreciative as the father
once was. The father describes the view as pretty much being the same. How things felt
the same, like the moss on his feet and such. He didn't feel that the lake had changed any,
but everything around it did. This is when the idea of a duel personality comes into
picture. The father can almost see himself as a child, doing the things he wished his son
would do. When he was young he would get up especially early to fix his fishing pole and
even help set the dinner table. Then he realizes that his son doesn't do any of these things,
making the father feel as if the trip just isn't the same. As the story progresses, the father
begins to point out the differences of his once peaceful get-a way. How when arriving was
something to look forward to, seeing all of the other family's greet you, the madness of
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the train station, and the smells of the wilderness. All of those things were gone, replace
by motor boats that would wake you up in the middle of a summer slumber. Lastly the
father brings up the thunderstorm. To me this represents the birth of a new him. I say this
because once the rain clears up and the dark skies disappear, he begins to look at his son,
and the entire trip in a different light. He forgets the years of old, and realizes that he is
not his son, he stops trying to live his life through his son's eyes. When at the end he feel
the cold chill of death at his groin, I feel this is him letting the trip be just a trip, not
pushing his son to do exactly what he once did. He lets the boy do what he wants, not do
what the father had done all those years down by the lake.
 Some reviews on the writer’s style
"Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White's style
incorporates eloquence without affection, profundity without pomposity, and wit without
frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White's creative, humane,
and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities."
 Essay as a literary genre
Essay, a short work that treats of a topic from an author's personal point of view,
often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon
them.Virtually anything may be the subject of an essay. Topics may include actual
happenings, issues of human life, morality, ethics, religion and many others. An essay is,
by definition, a work of non-fiction, and is often expository.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first
works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word
essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Notable essayists are legion. They include Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles
Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter
Bagehot, George Orwell, and E.B. White.
To define the genre of essay is probably impossible, but the following remarks by Aldous
Huxley, regarded in his day as a leading practitioner of the genre, may be of interest:
"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost
anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore
impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. Essays belong to
a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a
three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical;
there is the pole of the
objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the
abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of
only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them.
There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective
autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description.
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There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves,
but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme . . .. And
how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! . . . The
most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of
all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays,
"Preface").
Assignment
Write an essay on one of your experience following the essay style of “Once More to the
Lake”
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