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July 10, 2026
from “Once More to the Lake”
by E. B. White
“Even though I know what’s coming, with each reading of this often sunny and tender essay I feel the shock anew.”—THE
After thirteen years of devoting the second week in July to a paragraph from E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” we have come to the last paragraph! The impeccably written essay about the author returning to the family lake house with his son was first published in Harper's magazine in 1941. ​You can find all of the other paragraphs from “Once More to the Lake” with our commentaries by going to our archives tab above, and you can read the entire essay online here.​
The Paragraph of the Week
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When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.
—E. B. White
Commentary
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We should not be surprised by the last sentence of E. B. White’s most celebrated essay. He prefigures the gloom in almost every paragraph. He returns to the lake to “revisit old haunts,” he writes in paragraph one, and in succeeding paragraphs the lake is described as still like a “cathedral”, “remote and primeval,” and “creepy.” In the penultimate paragraph gods watching the “deathless joke” of mere mortals swimming in the rain “are grinning and licking their chops in the hills.” But even though I know what’s coming, with each reading of this often sunny and tender essay I feel the shock of the last word anew. Always in the background of our lives, memento mori do not surprise, but the “chill of death” does.
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—THE
This Visible Speaking
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Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
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.
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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.
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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.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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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.
