00:15:32:14 → Henry Beston


Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice. Man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, and sees there by a feather magnified, and the whole image and distortion. 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 splendor and travail of the earth.

(The Outermost House: A year of life on the great beach of Cape Cod, 1928)


Henry Beston Writer and Naturalist