Saturday August 02, 2003 at 5:36 PM
The Outermost House
Appearing in The Environment
In September of 1926, Henry Beston, a former journalist and magazine editor, moved into a 20’ x 16’ foot house two miles south of the Eastham Lighthouse on Cape Cod. Living alone in the two-room cottage, the 38 year-old Beston spent the next 12 months recording the observations and reflections that would become The Outermost House.
Although considered a classic of American literature, Beston’s work had escaped my attention until I came upon the following quotation while reading The Empty Ocean by Richard Ellis:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a 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 thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we 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 the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living 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 splendour and travail of the earth.”
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
Looks like The Outermost House just found a spot on my nightstand.
