A Minute Meditation

Henry Beston
Northern Farm: A Chronicle of Maine
written during the late 1930s
first published in 1949


When the nineteenth century and the industrial era took over our western civilization, why was it that none saw that we should all presently become peoples without a past?  Yet this is precisely what has happened and it is only now that the results of the break have become clear.

The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience.  Nothing of this sort has ever occurred in history.   

This was written during the late 1930s and published in 1949.  Is any of the above relevant today?   To be honest, I'm not even sure I know what he means.   Perhaps it's because I'm an urbanite (if there is such a word), having grown up and spent all of my life in cities.  I did spend a number of summers while growing up on my grandparents' farm in Wisconsin, but that was only for three months of the year.  I wonder if that loss he speaks of accounts for my fascination with and love of the writings of Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch,  John Muir (a recent discovery), Konrad Lorenz, and now Henry Beston.  All focus on the natural world and on those who share this unique planet with us.

Yet, Beston speaks of this loss: The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience.  What has this to do with our alienation from the natural world?    Unlike so many fortunate people, I find only questions and more questions and seldom answers.

Two New England Farmers--A Brief Conversation

One comments. . .

As I  "mushed" on into a little clearing, walking towards the sun, I had a glimpse of a winter effect I always like to see.  On the tops of the trees the wind was blowing, and just ahead of me there suddenly fell from a hemlock branch a quantity of snow which disintegrated to powder in the sunlit air.  As it thus dissolved, the snow dust turned to a mist of rainbow brilliance, a certain coppery, bronzy glow seeming to hang for a moment against the sun.  



The other replies . . .

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.




The paragraph is from Henry Beston's Northern Farm:  A Chronicle of Maine, and the poem is by Robert Frost, "Dust of Snow."


I don't know if they ever met, but I think they would have gotten along very nicely.

Henry Beston: The Outermost House

I had only in the past year heard of Henry Beston and his classic work The Outermost House.  This is actually my second reading of the book, which gives a clear indication of my feelings about the book.  I am not going to try to review the book, for that is beyond my skills.  Suffice it to say that I enjoyed the book and will read it again.  It's one of those rare books.

Beston had had a cabin built on Cape Cod, not far from the Atlantic shore of the peninsula.  In September of 1924 he went to the cabin, planning on spending only a few weeks there.   Instead he found himself reluctant to leave.  His two-week stay eventually lasted a full year, in which he took copious notes about the seasonal changes occurring there to the beach, the weather, and the birds, plants, and animals that were his neighbors.  The Outermost House is the result of that unplanned year on Cape Cod.

Instead of a review, I will simply post several quotations from the work so as to give you an idea of Beston's ideas and  writing skills. 


"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 splendor and travail of the earth."


He seems to contradict the well-know assertion that "man is the measure of all things," supposedly made by the Greek philosopher Protagoras.  Moreover he also appears to question some of the more sympathetic views of the animal kingdom, especially that of St.  Francis of Assisi who fequently referred to our furred and feathered neighbors as brothers and sisters.  Beston simply states that they are "not brethren" nor are they "underlings." but a separate people with their own powers and abilities.

What do you think?   Is Beston right about our relationship with the other inhabitants who are "fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

Or, is it legitimate to set humanity up as the measure of all things or even perhaps to see them as our brethren?


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