Once More To The Lake Analysis

The illusion of time, particularly the loss or stoppage of time, is apparent in both Peter

Jon Lindberg’s “Summerland” as well as E.B. White’s “Once More to The Lake” because both

men in the stories are returning back to places they have traveled to before, either as a child with

his father or as a teenager with his friends, and they notice that even though their surroundings

have changed due to the progression of time, everything seems to slow down or even stop once

they immerse themselves back into the environment.

Lindberg captures the stoppage of time perfectly when he states, “… we find everything

as we left it-as if we’d merely stepped out for a Dr. Pepper in the middle of a game of paddleball,

then returned, 358 days later, to resume it” (Lindberg 2). This

caught my eye when I read it
simply because it is true, when a person vacations back to the same place they have been for
years nothing really seems to change, but at the same time there is a sense of progression.

E.B.

White also talked about how scenery, when left alone not to be touched by anything or anyone

can seem to stay frozen in time, “…the lake was exactly where we had left it, the same number

of inches from the dock, and there was only the merest suggestion of a breeze. This seemed an

utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back

to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water” (White).

E.B. White’s story is all about continuing with tradition, his father brought him to the

lake when he was a boy and now he brings his son to the lake. Tradition is a great revealer of

time because people get to experience things that their parents got to and maybe even have their

own children experience the same things. E.B. White writes about how when his father brought

him to the lake back in 1904, there were barely any paved roads, tiny shops, and no cars; but

upon returning to the same lake with his son there are now paved roads that go up to a half

mile
towards the lake, there are cars parked outside that same little shop that he used to go to as a boy,
but yet everything still have a similar feeling to how he experienced the same exact place as a
young boy. The sense of time when you are a child can seem much different than when you are
an adult, especially when you have a child of your own; it makes you almost realize how your
parents felt during that time of your life and how they dealt with the process of you becoming
your own person. One passage from “Once More to The Lake” really struck me was when E.B.
White was explaining that he could see himself in his son and how he was imagining how his
father must have felt at the time, “…I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore,
by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the
time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I
seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act…suddenly it
would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture” (White).
Time can be tricky and can easily slip away from people if they are not paying attention,
but sometimes that is a good thing. Loosing oneself and feeling carefree is one of the best things
about a vacation (at least in my perspective), it allows you to let go of the constraints that time
tends to create and explore your surroundings with no limitations. The best types of vacations (at
least to me) are the ones where you are surrounded by loved ones; either family or friends, and
you lose all sense of time and being which allows you to just live and explore.