Common Theme Of Memory In Forgetfulness, And Once More To The Lake

Memories from the past are shown throughout our environment. Sometimes, recalling memories from surroundings are simple, like looking into the eyes of your father. As people proceed in their lives, they encounter moments that affect them deeply. Sometimes, a discharge of memories occur, showing a recognition of righteousness in people. In a short story called “Aero Bars” by Robert Hilles, the narrator acknowledges his father’s love through recalling the past. By reminiscing memories of remarkable values or behaviours, one is able to develop a moral conscience.

E. B. White's story "Once More to the Lake" is about a man who revisits a lake from his childhood to discover that his life has lost placidity.  The man remembers his childhood as he remembers the lake; peaceful and still.  Spending time at the lake as an adult has made the man realize that his life has become unsettling and restless, like the tides of the ocean.  Having brought his son to this place of the past with him, the man makes inevitable comparisons between his own son and his childhood self, and between himself as an adult and the way he remembers his father from his childhood perspective.  The man's experience at the lake with his son is the moment he discovers his own

“Once More to the Lake” is an essay that was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1941 by author E.B. White. The author tells the story through a first-person point of view and describes his experience at a lakefront camp in Maine. The essay shows White going through an internal conflict between perceiving the lake and acting as he did as a child and observing the lake and acting as an adult. White’s experience and views as an adult almost seem identical to his experience as a child until it is effected by his recognition of the technology difference in the boats. Certain moments, such as when the author and his son are fishing, reminds White of when he spent those moments with his father. These nostalgic moments help White realize that even though human life is transient and insignificant, but experiences are eternal. The author sees that even though his revisit is slightly different, his son still has the same experience that he had when he was young.

Memory is a powerful concept. Often when an individual undergoes a traumatic situation, the ramifications of these actions seep into an individualfs psyche unknowingly. In effect this passes through memory and becomes sub-consciously buried within a personfs behavioural patterns generally. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink explores the concept of a young mans subconscious desire for a woman whom he gcanft remember to forgeth (1Memento) as she is so deeply inlaid within his soul.

Memories are important, they are a personal record of our past experiences, and could be called the history book for our life. In the poem "The Heroes You Had as a Girl", author Bronwen Wallace tells the story of a woman who meets her high school hero later in her life, reflects on her memories of him, and ultimately decides not to talk to him. The effect that this topic has on everyone is the knowledge that we can be captivated and let our memories control us, and by knowing that our memories hold that much power, it may make it more mentally efficient to make accurate, and personal decisions in a fraction of the time. The topic and overall meaning that this idea holds convey a message that resonates with the idea that memories are in fact the central hub of our decision making. People remembering memories can affect their perspective on their lives to such an extent, that they prefer to immerse their mind in their past memories rather than the current reality.

Authors often create texts that share common themes to teach readers importance of certain aspects and hardships of life. Theme may be expressed through an author’s use of rhetorical devices and many other contributing factors such as figurative language and repetition. The essay, “Once More to the Lake” written by E.B. White and the poem “Forgetfulness” written by Billy Collins, both contain a theme of identity loss. In “Once More to the Lake” E.B White connects to a lake at young age and when returning with his son years later is unable to identify himself. In similar theme “Forgetfulness” describes different factors of human life and everyday things being forgotten and lost. Both White and Collins use repetition and metaphors to further push the theme of identity loss throughout the texts.

This line is the epitome of remembrance. We all look back on our childhood and reminisce on the joyful moments in our life. We cling on to the details, remembering what the scene smelled, tasted, and looked like. This is exactly what E.B White is portraying in his passage “Once More to the Lake.” This line is a

Hart Crane utilizes similes in metaphors in “Forgetfulness” to convey the the theme that being forgetful is to be lost.

Memory is something all humans struggle with. A person’s memory is everything. It shapes the entirety of a person’s being. The fear of losing your memory is a uniquely human phenomenon, and to some degree I believe it must haunt every person. In these two poems, both titled “Forgetfulness”, two poets explore the idea of losing yourself and being human. Although their voices are very different, and the techniques which they employ to get their message across, the topic of the poems is the same. The truth is that forgetfulness is a many-headed beast, and it’s entirely valid that two different viewpoints could explore different aspects of it. Hart Crane’s poem focuses on the image of forgetfulness, the effect it has on humanity as a whole, and

F. Scott Fitzgerald understands that memory is a double-edged sword, and he illustrates this thought in two of his short stories, Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. In his story Babylon Revisited, the protagonist, Charles Wales, is tormented by memories of his past. His wife is dead, and his old friends won’t stop interfering in his life. His sister-in-law is basing her current ideas of him on the fact that he was an irresponsible person in the past, and it hurts his life greatly. Winter Dreams takes a slightly different approach. In this tale, the memories of the protagonist, Dexter Green, start off as pleasant but are later warped by new information. With these two works, Fitzgerald describes the problems that memories can cause in

Memory is one of our greatest assets. “It is how we know who we are. Memory gives us a sense of history, our origin, roots, and identity. By it we relive special events, birthdays, anniversaries and days of national significance. The Lord’s Supper is a call to remember Christ and the cross.” The relationships we have in our lives often become stronger as we take time to reflect on what that person has done for us in the past and continues to do for us. As adults we are able to look back and see the sacrifices our parents made for us and we realize just how much they

  Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of experiences actual or imagined. They provide a framework for creating meaning in one's own life as well as in the lives of others. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self imposed prison of memory. She expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Though Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of these memories, her will is essentially defined by and tied to the

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

Collin’s purpose of evoking emotion to the reader and signifying the continual process of forgetting is revealed through small attention to detail such as the common diction and personification. Collins uses very clever and witty images to describe the process of forgetting to ironically make it seem that memories are not as important, although they are significant in individuals lives: “the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain.” Here Collins plays on the idea of an older person retiring not only from a job, but retiring from his or her own mind. Collins reaches out to the older audience saying that forgetting is a normal process of life, one that must be accepted. Collins also personifies the phrase “the quadratic equation pack(ed) its bag” to explain that important facts are decreasing, showing that the mind has no control later in life. He also uses personification to give the writing more variation and to

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s