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July 11, 2025
from “Once More to the Lake”
by E. B. White
“The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake.”
—E. B. White
Each year around the birthday of E. B. White we feature a paragraph from his classic essay “Once More to the Lake.” We have done ten of them by now which you can easily find by going to the archives and searching on White's name. Early on in this exercise I worried that I would use up all the good paragraphs so that by now—our eleventh year—I would be stuck with the leftovers, but that fear was ungrounded. There are no bad paragraphs here. As White once advised, each one “tells.”
Paragraph of the Week
The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming country although the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That's what our family did. But although it wasn't wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it which, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval.
—E. B. White
You can read E. B. White's entire essay here
Commentary
At first this small paragraph, inserted just after the introduction, appears to be exposition, but my view is that no paragraph in this masterpiece is merely functional. Following the pattern of the opening paragraphs, which end with the words “haunt” and “cathedral,” this paragraph ends with “primeval,” advancing White’s theme of a lost world of childhood wonder momentarily regained. To E. B. White, the adult, the lake could not be called “wild.” He describes it as “undisturbed,” and only “fairly large.” Cozy cottages crowded in along the wooded shore with pastoral farms just beyond them, where visitors ate their meals. But to him as a boy the lake seemed not only “primeval” but “infinitely remote,” a haunted and mysterious place, and for the length of twelve paragraphs he gets to inhabit this ever-green world once again until the final paragraph snatches it away.
—THE
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Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
