passing year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod...but it's
really about much more than that.
The Outermost House by Henry Beston
and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year,
I went there to spend a fortnight in September.
The fortnight ending, 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,
I could not go..."
there is always reserve and mystery,
always something beyond, on earth and sea
something which nature, honouring, conceals."
"The splendour of colour in this world of sea and dune
ebbed from it like a tide; it shallowed first without
seeming to lose ground, and presently vanished all at
once, almost, so it seemed, in one grey week."
"April and the sun advancing, the disk rising each day
to the north of where it leaped from yesterday's ocean
...burning, consuming winter in fire."
"When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps
of the heavens..., a new door opens for the human spirit,
and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the
mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze.
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves...
pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons
across eternal seas of space and time."
"The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was
personal and sexual, becomes social in mid-summer.
Stirred by the vernal fire, a group psychically dissolves,
for every creature in a flock is intent upon the use
and the offering of his own awakened flesh. With the
rearing of the young, and their integration into the
reestablished group, life again becomes a social rhythm.
The body has been given and sacrificially broken,
its own gods and all gods obeyed."
"My year upon the beach had come full circle;
it was time to close my door.
Now, once again, the Hunter rose to drive summer south
before him, once again, autumn followed on his steps."
"So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is
he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse
he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a
solitary note heard in a symphony...
Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science.
It is as impossible to live without reverence
as it is without joy."
The Outermost House was first published by Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, Inc. in 1928. There have been many editions published
since then. ISBN 0-345-28978-1