So his purpose is not to teach naturalism, per se, but to convey a sense of the sublime beauty, preciousness, majesty, and drama of the nature he is describing. The book is ostensibly a memoir, but one begins to perceive a greater purpose beyond simply cataloging the seasons of the year at Cape Cod, when one learns that not all of his scientific observations are accurate or even specific to the given season in which they are described. However, as so many reviewers over the decades have noted, there is something captivating, calming in an almost otherworldly way, poetic, and even thrilling in Beston's writing. I have never been to Cape Cod, and on the surface, I could imagine some readers not being particularly captivated by Beston's descriptions of bird flight, the behaviors of this or that species, the names of different flowers and animals, similar to how some readers understandably have little patience for the technical descriptions of whales and whaling in Moby-Dick. I first encountered this book as an undergraduate, in a literature of nature class. Robert Finch once wrote of him, "His are burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud."īeautifully written, beautifully narrated Thoreau before him, and Rachel Carson after him, Beston was a writer of stunning beauty, importance, and vision. The landscape was his major character, and his writing provides a snapshot of the Cape, a place physically changed yet still as soulful 80 years later. In The Outermost House, originally published in 1928, he poetically chronicled the four seasons at the beach: the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, storms, stars, and solitude. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go."īeston stayed for a year, meditating on humanity and the natural world.
In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod.
The Outermost House is a classic of American nature literature.
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