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Once more to the lake eb white5/19/2023 ![]() “There is no doubt about it, the basic satisfaction in farming is manure, which always suggests that life can be cyclical and chemically perfect and aromatic and continuous.” -E.B. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true farmer and a good writer. ![]() Now it strikes me as odd that nobody mentioned E.B. So I dutifully mentioned Berry and Jackson. ![]() As if those readers were saying, “This book is part of a literary tradition.” A novelist doesn’t have to prove he’s read Moby-Dick, but nonfiction is different. And as my annoyance faded I also saw that concerns about my writerly lineage were a kind of praise. I wondered if my critics knew about Maine organic theorist Eliot Coleman about Australian permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison about Zimbabwe-born Allan Savory, whose Holistic Resource Management is the most profound treatise on conservation and human decision-making I’ve ever read.īut they aren’t literary men. Plus my day job was in publishing, so there were plenty more authors in my memoir, including Bromfield’s elderly daughter, a rancher in Brazil. Their writings on agriculture and American society have informed my thinking from my late teens Berry’s Jayber Crow is one of my all-time favorite novels.īut why must I tell readers of my story that?Īs it was, Shepherd explored my boyhood hero worship of Ohio agrarian writer Louis Bromfield and my being influenced as a practitioner by Bromfield’s pragmatic eco-farming successor, Joel Salatin and my discovery of Charles Allen Smart’s classic memoir, RFD, set in the same region, southern Ohio, where I ended up becoming farmer during a tumultuous decade. Those early draft-readers wondered if I’d read Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. White, One Man’s Meatĭuring the years I worked on a memoir of farming, I learned that book folk interested in country matters wanted assurance my literary-agrarian pedigree was pure. “I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.” -E.B. White and Me categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence 4 comments The Domestic Surveillance Debate: Apple vs.Richard Gilbert E.B.Charles Krauthammer – Food fads: Make mine gluten-ful.David Brooks – The Governing Cancer of Our Time.Animal Farm by George Orwell – Analysis of Old Major’s Speech.Propaganda in Animal Farm by George Orwell.Stephen King – Reading to Write (from On Writing).Search for: Categories Categories Recent Posts White uses the metaphor to show his realization that he cannot avoid death, even in this place of eternity. In the surprising conclusion to his essay, E. He now understands that the lake will stay the same forever while generation after generation passes on and that he is getting closer to death when he sees his son doing what his younger self would have done. He realizes that old age and death is inevitable. He suddenly becomes aware that he cannot avoid old age or death, even in this ageless place. It is at that moment that his illusion shatters. Because he has done exactly the same thing in his time, the memory of that is so strong and physical that he actually feels the wet swimsuit around his groin. The final enlightenment comes when his son goes swimming in the rain while he languidly sits and watches. This strange illusion kept cropping up all the time. To him, it represents eternity.ĭespite the peace and quiet, he is persistently bothered by the sensation that his son was he and that he was his father. He refers to the lake as a “holy spot” and a “cathedral”, a place of sanctity and peace. The fact that everything remains pretty much the same and his own wish to suspend time inspires in him the illusion that “the years were a mirage and that there had been no years.” He settles comfortably into this calm environment. Other than a few minute changes, “all was just as it had always been.” He was excessively disturbed by the missing middle track of the road and the “petulant, irritable sound” of outboard motors, which he compares to whining mosquitoes. In the woods by the lake, he finds that nothing has changed since his childhood. Thus, he longs for “the placidity of a lake in the woods” to avoid it. The reason that he comes to the lake is because he is weary of the restless sea, which represents the fast, relentless pace of time and age. White ends with a mystifying sentence, “As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.” He uses this puzzling conclusion as a metaphor for his sudden realization that he could not escape from time and his confrontation with mortality.
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