June 1: Happy Birthday Henry Beston

Writer and naturalist Henry Beston was born on June 1st 1888.  He is best known for The Outermost House:  A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, which he wrote in 1925 as he struggled with the trauma of surviving World War I.  While many veteran intellectuals turned to a destructive lifestyle (think: Earnest Hemingway), Beston sought the refuge of nature to heal his soul.

When I need to heal my soul, I turn to Henry Beston.  The Outermost House is one of those rare works that rejuvenates through introspection and observation.  Beston's work is not devoid of surmising and making judgements, though.  Beston is a critic of modernity, the machine, the oil fouling the beach from the barges, and modern civilization that outrages our sense of smell.

To my mind, we live too completely by the eye.  I like a good smell...

What a stench modern civilization breathes, and how have we ever learned to endure that foul blue air?

We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive.  Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grow duller.

I understand that Henry Beston wrote The Outermost House with a pencil, and that he was affronted by the mechanical sound of the typewriter, which interfered with the rhythm of his narrative.

Rachel Carson is known to have said that Henry Beston was the only author who ever influenced her work.

You can join Henry Beston at the outermost house on the outer beach of Eastham, Cape Cod.   By Naucet light.  With the wind, the sand, the birds and the sea as your companions. 

Happy Birthday, Henry.