What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page

Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen’s lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York.

In the poems’ dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song, the poet writes from a cubicle as it is being sawed in half, and the speaker of the title poem decides “to quit everything except work.” 

E.B. White’s 1941 essay “Once More to the Lake” (from his collection “One Man’s Meat”) is a masterclass in how nostalgia can warp our grip on time.

Returning to a childhood vacation spot in Maine — now with his son in tow — White confronts a haunting truth: Places outlive people, even as they mirror our mortality.

At its heart, the essay is about doubling. Watching his son fish and swim in the same waters, White slips into a surreal haze torn between seeing himself as father and child. The lake’s stillness tricks him into believing nothing has changed — until modernity intrudes.

Those once-quiet mornings? Now punctured by motorboats, their “restless” engines churning the peace he remembers.

What makes the essay unforgettable is its quiet dread. White’s prose drips with tactile details: The “sweet chill” of a dawn swim, the scent of pine needles and the creak of old rowboats.

But this vividness sharpens the sting of his realization. In the final lines, a sudden rainstorm snaps the illusion. As his son buttons a raincoat, White feels time’s verdict: “Suddenly my groin felt the cold chill of death.”

Stylistically, White avoids grand pronouncements. Instead, he lets small moments — a dragonfly’s hover, the click of a fishing rod — carry the weight of existential awe.

Decades later, the essay still resonates. Why? Because we have all clung to a memory-place, willing it to defy time. White’s genius lies in showing how that very act binds us to life’s fleetingness.

For me, the most haunting takeaway is this: We are all temporary visitors to “fade-proof” landscapes. The lake remains. We do not.