The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
By Henry Beston
4.5/5
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About this ebook
The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the classic book about Cape Cod, "written with simplicity, sympathy, and beauty" (New York Herald Tribune)
A chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach, The Outermost House has long been recognized as a classic of American nature writing. Henry Beston had originally planned to spend just two weeks in his seaside home, but was so possessed by the mysterious beauty of his surroundings that he found he "could not go."
Instead, he sat down to try and capture in words the wonders of the magical landscape he found himself in thrall to: the migrations of seabirds, the rhythms of the tide, the windblown dunes, and the scatter of stars in the changing summer sky. Beston argued that, "The world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot." Seventy-five years after they were first published, Beston's words are more true than ever.
Henry Beston
Henry Beston was a writer/naturalist and a founder of the modern environmental movement.
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Reviews for The Outermost House
14 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Henry Beston's amazing recounting of his year on the outermost banks of Cape Cod is a revelation of nature in all its forces.It is a classic in the tradition of Thoreau and would be beloved by Emerson.As a companion to a seasonal gardening book, like THE GARDENER'S YEAR by Karel Capek,it would provide contrasts and expand our inland views.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is wonderful to ready good writing that celebrates the natural world without romanticizing it. Beston describes the ocean and its waves with a clarity of understanding and expression I have seldom read. His connection with the natural world and especially with birds reveals the wonders there while neither refusing to see the violence inherent nor impose a human ethic on that living way.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry Beston went to Cape Cod and meant to stay in the house he had built for two weeks. He ended up staying for a year, and the journals he kept while he was there were the basis for this classic published in 1928.Beston describes the natural world with poetry, writing about its beauty and its raw power, and ruminating on how mankind has separated from really participating in the natural world. Reading it so soon after Walden, it was hard not to compare the two books in my head and be lulled by the quietness of this one into almost monotony. Beston gives a different sort of wake up call, and though I didn't have the connection to Cape Cod, I did find a few gems of quotes in it. Mostly the monotony came from reading too many nature books in close quarters and having to finish it on a specific date for book club.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5First published in 1928, the beauty of the language is timeless. Who knew someone could describe the sand and sea in so many ways? Beston's book is a poetic gift and left me with an even greater appreciation of the Cape and our natural world in general. Excerpt:"Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places."(Personally, I recommend skipping the introduction by Robert Flinch. Seems to me he's in love with his own writing. Go back and read it at the end if you like.)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The world happens everyday, everywhere. We're often forgetful whence we came and we easily dismiss that seemingly distant background which is always there – nature.
Henry Beston is the willing witness of a year round experience in the sands of Cape Cod beach. Humbled by the very spectacle of change, the author becomes one of us, and through him we see, listen, feel, smell and become united with the majesty of a world thriving with life. We follow the old rhythm of the earth as it follows the Sun, and before us nature shines: glorious, beautiful, generous, bountiful. And as it happens, we see it unfolding, as it should be, as it always does, bewildering with an elemental and transcendental beauty. This is what makes this book a masterpiece. Nature becomes the main character of a novel without narrative, where people are but silhouettes in that greater background where everything happens, everyday, everywhere. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I take a dim view of being advised on simple living by people who apparently don't have to earn one.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm really not a fan of the beach in general, but Henry Beston's "The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod" made me long for a little home on the dunes. The book, written in the 1920's focuses on the natural world found on the Cape where Beston lived for a year to watch the change of seasons. I liked this almost as much as Thoreau's "Walden." There are lots of descriptions of birds and the landscape, which are beautifully written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In 1925 Beston spent a year living in a simple two-room home on the outer arm of Cape Cod, facing the wide Atlantic Ocean. This book is a series of essays documenting the seasons there.Beston believed that poetry had as much to do with his observations as science did, and his prose is “burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud.” (Robert Finch, Introduction)This is a book to be read in small doses and savoured. It’s everything I had hoped Walden would be, but wasn’t. Highly recommended. 5 stars.Read this if: you love lyrical descriptions of creation’s beauty; or you want a glimpse of a vanished Cape Cod.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Henry Beston built a two room house on Coast Guard Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Originally the house was designed to be a summer getaway cabin but after two weeks Beston decided to see what it would be like to spend a year on the beach. During that time he wrote a memoir of the experience, recording everything he saw, heard, smelled, touched and experienced. As a result he published The Outermost House which became a best seller. Along the lines of Thoreau, Beston was enamored with living the simple life and experiencing nature in it most raw form. There were many times I found myself agreeing with Beston or being envious of his adventure. Even the storms that blew up the beach produced fascinating fodder for Beston's book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not a huge fan of nautre writing, me, but this one had me hooked - at least for most part. There is an earnest passion in the writing that is hard to be indifferent to, and some passages, like the ones about the sound of the sea for instance, is simply magical.It is also surprisingly dramatic, with its descriptions of the harsh conditions on and around Cape Cod, storms, shipwrecks and all.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beston describes a year he spent in a house he had built for him on the dunes above the beach in the middle of the forearm of Cape Cod, near Eastham and the Nauset Coast Guard Station. He calls the house the Fo’castle, and he goes there in September to spend a couple of weeks, but ends up staying a year. He begins with the beach itself, and then describes the autumn birds migrating through. He spends a chapter on waves and surf. In a chapter called “Night on the Great Beach,” Beston suggests it was not primitive peoples who were afraid of night and the dark, but we. “With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.” And he says “civilization is full of people . . . who have never even seen night,” an amazing observation for a time when there were still dark skies to be found all over the northeast. In this chapter he also describes sand fleas eating phosphorescent protozoa or bacteria on the beach and becoming completely luminous, then dying from the infection.He has some memorable passages, such as this one describing flocks of sandpipers in flight:No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the flights of these shorebird constellations. The constellation forms, as I have hinted, in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from each other, each one individually busy for his individual body’s sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined. There is no such thing, I may add, as a lead bird or guide.The sight makes him think about how very different animals are from our experience as human beings:We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. . . . 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 splendour and travail of the earth.This reminded me of Montaigne in “The Defense of Raymond Sebond.”Though he does some surprisingly inventive things with language (“luke-cold” by analogy with lukewarm, “a scatter of houses”), his style is deceptively simple; for example, he says of the spring migration of geese that he hears but cannot see overhead, “a river of life was flowing that night across the sky.” The new color that appears on the dunes in spring “is a tint of palest olive . . . born of the mingling of pale sand, blanched grass, and new grass spears of a certain eager green.” The urgency of spring makes him think of life’s plenitude: “I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas.”Beston gives the scientific names of the birds and insects he mentions, and sometimes these have changed since his time: the Barn Swallow for him was Hirundo erythrogastra, the red-belllied swalllow; now he’s Hirundo rustica, the country swallow. The Bank Swallow is Riparia riparia, doubly of the riverbank. The Common Tern, by the way, is Sterna hirundo, the swallow tern. The Tree Swallow used to be Iridoprocne bicolor, reminding us of the myth of Procne and Philomela, but now is Tachycineta bicolor, a two-colored fast mover. Beston describes the night patrols and the surfmen of the coastal stations. In one chapter he takes a walk across the width of the Cape. The penultimate chapter, “The Year at High Tide,” covers the summer months and ends with the birds once again starting south, and with a short section on a swimmer Beston sees—as if he’s signaling a return to the human world, though he has had daily and nightly contacts with the coast guard station staff. At the end of the book—and the night between August and September—he sleeps outside and sees Orion rising at dawn.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5very interesting; great discriptions of nature; at times it's difficult to realize that Beston wrote this book back in the 1920's -- especially during references to "living in a world with too many lights" (not an exact quote). I gave the book to my 87 yr old aunt to read at the same time & she was throughly enjoying it too!