In the mornings long ago, he would be the first one up and “would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. His boyhood habit of rising early and taking to the lake ties the present to the past as he hears his son do the same. He writes that he remembered most clearly “the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen” (198).

White’s description of the cabins at the lake provides the first example of his focus on details, and this initiates his confusion of the present experience with the past. The points of comparison are multiple and the language he uses to describe them is concrete and specific. This idea emerges as White compares his memories of the lake with his experience upon revisiting it with his son.

But while the lake in its essence remains unchanged, White himself is different, and so he finally accepts a fundamental irony of life: Because the natural cycle of birth, childhood, maturity, and death are enduring, he too is subject to the natural course that leads to death. Returning to the lake after many years with his son, Joe, White confronts multiple changes as he struggles with the illusion that the idyllic world of his childhood, and his present existence within it, remain the same. The theme of White’s essay is the passage of time and the changes that it brings. In the end, White’s contemplation of the particulars, both remembered and freshly observed, leads him to the realization of the last pole of Huxley’s trinity - an insight that reaches beyond the particular to affirm an universal truth. This language establishes ”the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular” pole of Huxley’s criteria for excellence. The personal and autobiographical source of the essay is authenticated by its concrete and specific language. The lake that White writes about is Great Pond and is one of several in the vicinity of Belgrade, Maine referred to collectively as the Belgrade Lakes (Elledge 27). It arises from a firsthand experience common among Americans for generations: the summertime escape from the city to a mountain lake. “Once More to the Lake” is autobiographical and intensely personal. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake,” shows that this essay rises to the level of the “most richly satisfying” because White does “make the best. Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these consummate works of art, hither and thither between the essay’s three poles – from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience” (v and vii “Preface”).Īpplying Huxley’s three pole analysis to E. Later he adds: “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. 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 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. In the preface to his Collected Essays, Aldous Huxley says that “essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference.

White once more to the lake