Typically when people return to the areas of their childhood they return to find it tainted or changed for the worse in one way or another. I find an interesting aspect of this essay to be the perception that the author has of his childhood lake. How will these new experiences and ideas affect White in his relationship with his own son? What is his conclusion at the end of the trip? Unlike where White is visiting from, the people, the lake, the cottages, and all that surrounds the lake seems to be untouched by time. I think that while White was back in this stagnant lake town, he was also able to see society in a different light.
One that helped White come to a better understanding with the man that his father was, and the man that he would like to become. I think that this journey to the lake with his own son was a cleansing trip. “…he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father…” White becomes his father in some points of the essay, his son in other parts of the essay and is himself in some as well. The strange dynamic that White describes between himself, his father, and his son, is followed by a sort-of loss of self. I think that all people feel a certain sadness when looking into a beautiful past, because of the fact that it isn’t the present. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the essay is centered around a negative vibe or attitude.
Nostalgia is a main focus of this essay, as White returns to lake of his childhood he immerses in a state of confusion with the similarities between the past and present. My question is has nostalgia ever become a point of sadness for you? It is at this moment that White feels that even his son’s youth is ending, which to him means that his time on earth is expiring. The essay ends in a morbid tone, with a thunderstorm raging, he notices his son putting on his trunks to go swimming. These feelings which White thought would comfort him only served to remind him of his aging.
He notes the overwhelming similarity the lake has upon his second visit to the lake of his youth. This crisis drives many of the feelings and actions White does over the course of the essay, as well as the observations he makes. It gave me a creepy sensation.” This duality as White calls it is commonly known today as a midlife crisis. I would be in the middle of some simple act… and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. White wrote, “I seemed to be living a dual existence. The trip to the Maine lake, a move which was supposed to return him to his youth, only augmented the unwanted paternal feelings. Instead, in the instances where his son went through similar experiences as him, White feels more like his father than himself. The deja vu portion of this essay details that White himself was at a tough point in his life where he no longer felt like the child which once roamed about the Maine woods. Yet, this essay doesn’t maintain the quaint, reminiscent tone with which it begins. The lush lexicon which White employs to detail the lake he so enjoys truly shows how much he loved being there. A midlife crisis, but a crisis nonetheless.
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