Descriptive Essay



Descriptive Essay

Once More to the Lake by E.B. White

Once More to the Lake by E.B. White Once More to the Lake, by E.B. White was an essay in which a father struggles to find himself. The essay is about a little boy and his father. They go to a lake where the father had been in his childhood years. The father looks back at those years and tries to relive the moments through his son's eyes. He knows he can't, and has difficulty dealing with the fact that he can't go back in time. E.B. White's way of letting the reader know that the father is in a way depressed, is through great detail and description. The story mentions how the lake has changes since the father had seen it last. How the once gravel roads have been paved over, and the sail boats are now replace with boats with outboard motors. As the reader, one can sense a feeling of how the father isn't able to adapt to these changes.

The little boy in the story, the son, also doesn't seem to appreciate the lake as much as the father did when he was growing up. Like how when he was a boy, he would wake up early to fish. Now the father wishes his son would do the same. It seemed the little boy just too the trip for granted. He didn't appear to be as appreciative as the father once was. The father describes the view as pretty much being the same. As the story progresses, the father begins to point out the differences of his once peaceful get-a way. How when arriving was something to look forward to, seeing all of the other family's greet you, the madness of the train station, and the smells of the wilderness. All of those things were gone, replace by motor boats that would wake you up in the middle of a summer slumber. Lastly the father brings up the thunderstorm.

The universal truth that White expresses is thus connected to other truths that are induced from the common experiences of humankind and that together form a network of interrelated truths that define the human condition. As Huxley suggests, a great essay combines a unique personal perspective on the concrete, the objective, the factual aspects of life, and induces from these a realization of a universal truth. But he might have also added that this universal truth suggests an expanding complex of associations that define what we know intellectually and comprehend emotionally about life.

The War Prayer by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the ...