But in recounting his experiences, White strikes a tone of elegy, as if his lake adventure is already receding into memory.
He finds that despite the decades, much remains the same. In the summer of 1941, as he turned 42, White returned to the same lake with his son, wondering if the magic could be repeated. We returned summer after summer-always on August 1st for one month.”
the vacation was a success, and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. “One summer, along about 1904,” he tells readers, “my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. The premise is simple, or at least appears to be. But White also published sublimely expressed essays about his life as a father, farmer, and husband, of which “Once More to the Lake” is perhaps the most famous. The children’s books that grew from that experience are justly celebrated. Seeking a change in how he lived and wrote, he moved to Maine with his wife, Katharine, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, a transition chronicled in a 2014 Humanities article. White had lived in Manhattan, thriving as a writer for the New Yorker, but he had a midlife crisis of sorts shortly before World War II. Elwyn Brooks White (1899–1985)-Andy to his friends-is best known as the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, children’s books inspired by his later years on a saltwater farm in Maine. White memorialized summer in “Once More to the Lake,” a 1941 meditation on the passage of time that has become among the most widely anthologized essays in the English language.
0 kommentar(er)
