Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Henry Beston's classic: The Outermost House

I am re-reading a naturalist's classic description of a year upon the beach of Cape Cod: Henry Beston's "The Outermost House". I first read it 40-some years ago. Here's a quote that may pull you toward this book (Beston writing about the birds of the outer Cape): "We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees a feather magnifield and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, lliving by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."