Mortality: Trees, Lakes And Lions

If you've been keeping up with popular culture, chances are you've seen The Lion King, a popular Disney film created in the nineties. It opens up with a beautiful view of an African sunrise and a musical number, entitled "The Circle of Life". As we witness the birth of the next lion king, a voice sings: "It's the circle of life, and it moves us all". For just an animated movie, the creators sneak a lot of wisdom into our brainwashed, media-obsessed heads. Although it may seem that the movie is intended solely for children, on a much deeper level it also entertains the thoughts of adults, on whose minds the idea of mortality is always creeping up.

We all wonder about our death. It is human nature to question our existence, and how and when it will we will meet our end. As a verse in Ecclesiastes says, "One event happeneth to them all" --death separates us, but it is what connects us through the generations as well. It is this very idea that E.B. White's short story "Once More to the Lake" is based upon.

In the story, a father and his son took a summer trip to the lake where the father once spent his summers with his own father. During the visit, the father "began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father" (115). He felt that "the years were a mirage and that there had been no years" (115). Most likely a middle-aged man, he was realizing the generations he was connected to. Perhaps his trip to the lake was his "mid-life crisis"-- he had an epiphany and realized he was coming closer to his death and that his son would eventually replace him just as he was replacing his own father.

The last paragraph of the story proves the most symbolic of them all. White writes of the boy, "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" (119). The last sentence not only represents the father's empathy for his son, but the phrase "chill of death" implies that the father is realizing that his own death is just around the corner. Also, the paragraph centers on the boy's and the father's "vitals," or means of reproduction. In this way, White fits in yet another aspect to the central idea of the interconnected generations.

"Once More to the Lake" is just one of the many beautiful writings centered on the idea of mortality. Another is entitled "Birches," written by Robert Frost. Frost has a different message for us; his poem focuses on birch trees and uses them as a metaphor for life (and towards the end of the poem, death.) The piece is filled with comparisons, a few