Henry Beston: on nature and animals

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.”
~ Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

For one year, Henry Beston lived in a small—but not austere—cottage on Cape Cod. His original intent was a two-week visit but he was totally enraptured by all that surrounded him and so he stayed.

Comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s year at Walden Pond have been made but, in my opinion, Beston out-Thoreau’s Thoreau. There is no ego, condescension or New England ascetism evident in Beston. More importantly, Beston is a superior writer; his prose is eloquent and strong. The ocean, beach, wind, storms, birds and animals of the Cape all inspire him.

In a passage that leapt off the page, Beston wrote poignantly about mankind’s relationship to animals.

All dog lovers will understand.

“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 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, 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.”