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The Outermost House discussion
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I purchased this book during my stay on Oak Island, North Carolina. I thought, well, Henry was on Cape Cod and I am spending the winter at a summer destination. The Oak Island where I was happened to be was lovely and enchanting, though I did not get to read Beston’s book. Now I will with the group.
Mod
It will take me up to two weeks to get this book from my library. Our curbside pickup program has very limited pickup time slots. I should be able to read it later in July.
Sher and Julie, perhaps we can target to start in two week when the library has the book available?
I’m flexible and don’t want to hold anyone back!
I have an eBook copy. Just retrieved it from the Cloud.
Mod
I have read this book at least twice. The first time I was living in Cape Cod - think it was 1988. Read it on Kindle more recently and thought it was a BOTM selection. I have enough books on kindle that it got pushed to the cloud to make room for newer ones.
This book strikes me as peaceful and contemplative. Most likely a perfect quiet read to get through the ravages of a pandemic.
It is a pleasure to read again the description of birds on the beach in chapter two. I had forgotten the description of a murmuration, though he does not sure that word.
I am also reading The Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson. She was first and foremost a writer, but also studied at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. There are some lyric passages about the ocean that make a nice mirror to Beston. Rereading Beston on has also gotten me thinking about Thoreau and his Cape Cod book we read a while back.
"The Outermost House" is a beautiful book. I wrote a bio of Beston for Harvard Magazine's Vita column a few years ago, and my recent book "Flight Calls: Exploring Massachusetts through Birds" includes a section on Beston in the chapter on Cape Cod. Here's an excerpt: "Beston calls himself a 'scholar with a poetic joy in the visible world.' He marvels at shorebird synchronicity and the enigma of bird tracks in sand, beginning nowhere, leaving a trace of alighting wing, then vanishing into 'the trackless nowhere of sky.' He learns that creation is dynamic, ongoing. After songbirds leave the Cape in late summer, they’re replaced by Arctic sea birds migrating thousands of miles 'from the nest-strewn crevices and ledges of Atlantic rocks no man has ever named or scaled.' Beston exclaims: 'What a gesture of ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance of circumstance and death--land wing and hostile sea, the fading land behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the bright, aerial blood.' Birds connect him to Earth’s rhythms and humble him: '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.'”
John wrote: ""The Outermost House" is a beautiful book. I wrote a bio of Beston for Harvard Magazine's Vita column a few years ago, and my recent book "Flight Calls: Exploring Massachusetts through Birds" inclu..."Fabulous commentary.
I am enjoying this reading of the book. Here is areview I wrote in 2018. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I also discovered a thread with previous comments on this book by members of our group. It just suddenly appeared.
I had forgotten the section where he talks about finding oiled birds on the beach, taking them home to try to nurse them back to health and then releasing them. Of course,treatment of such cases has improved dramatically since then.
Here is a segment from my highlights. This is at 51% of the Kindle version. A new danger, moreover, now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible residue of crude oil, called by refiners “slop,” remains in stills after oil distillation, and this is pumped into southbound tankers and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large areas, and the birds alight in it and get it on their feathers. They inevitably die. Just how they perish is still something of a question. Some die of cold, for the gluey oil so mats and swabs the thick arctic feathering that creases open through it to the skin above the vitals; others die of hunger as well. Captain George Nickerson of Nauset tells me that he saw an oil-covered eider trying to dive for food off Monomoy, and that the bird was unable to plunge. I am glad to be able to write that the situation is better than it was. Five years ago, the shores of Monomoy peninsula were strewn with hundreds, even thousands, of dead sea fowl, for the tankers pumped out slop as they were passing the shoals—into the very waters, indeed, on which the birds have lived since time began! To-day oil is more the chance fate of the unfortunate individual. But let us hope that all such pollution will presently end. (less)
Ray wrote: "John wrote: ""The Outermost House" is a beautiful book. I wrote a bio of Beston for Harvard Magazine's Vita column a few years ago, and my recent book "Flight Calls: Exploring Massachusetts through..."Ray, I enjoyed your review as well as the segment from your highlights. Thanks.
John wrote: "Ray wrote: "John wrote: ""The Outermost House" is a beautiful book. I wrote a bio of Beston for Harvard Magazine's Vita column a few years ago, and my recent book "Flight Calls: Exploring Massachus..."Thanks of r eading them.
Here is a highlight at 71% or page 150along the waste, the increasing light is transmuting the grey sand of winter to a mellowness of grey-white touched with silver; the moor blanches, the plant puts on the dark. To my mind this wild region is at its best in twilight, for its dun floor gathers the dark long before the sunset colour has faded from the flattened sky, and one may then walk there in the peace of the earth gloom and hear from far below the great reverberation of the sea.
The firt part of chapter nine is devoted to the five senses. Here is a auotation from page 218 or 85%Had I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on the sense of smell, for all my life long I have had of that sense an individual enjoyment. To my mind, we live too completely by the eye. I like a good smell—the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm morning after a night of April rain, the clovelike aroma of our wild Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the good reek of hot salt grass and low tide blowing from these meadows late on summer afternoons. What a stench modern civilization breathes, and how have we ever learned to endure that foul blue air? In the Seventeenth Century, the air about a city must have been much the same air as overhung a large village; to-day the town atmosphere is to be endured only by the new synthetic man
Wow, Ray. I am not that far along yet, but what an eye-opener (no pun intended). What we take in is often not the eye. We need to draw pleasures from the things we don’t ordinarily appreciate.
His decriptions of Harriers are breif but intribuing. I recall reading a book about Harriers at about the time I first read the outermost house. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... It was quite fascinating, though I nor longer have a copy Another I read at the time was about Least Terns. It was titled The Little Striker.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
Another COVID delay. I only recently received this book from my library. I haven't had time to read it yet, so I might be joining this discussion later.
Julie wrote: "Another COVID delay. I only recently received this book from my library. I haven't had time to read it yet, so I might be joining this discussion later."No rush - plenty of time.
I am rereading it.
Julie wrote: "Another COVID delay. I only recently received this book from my library. I haven't had time to read it yet, so I might be joining this discussion later."No rush - plenty of time.
I am rereading it.
Julie wrote: "Another COVID delay. I only recently received this book from my library. I haven't had time to read it yet, so I might be joining this discussion later."No rush - plenty of time.
I am rereading it.
I have this book on my Nook, but I must admit that I am behind on some of my reading. I have this problem of not being able to say no to new reads.Tropical Storm Isaias is here and thus I am hunkered down in coastal Carolina.
Beston generously shares his memories of a year lived on the beach at Cape Cod (1924-25). These days, photographs and videos are the preferred media for sharing experiences and we seem to have lost our mastery of words to describe what our senses ingest. But Beston is a sensory-journalist; each paragraph evokes an image and a feeling. My fellow Good-readers have quoted some defining passages. Here Beston describes a migration of geese in spring: “I climbed the big dune...I lingered there till the moon began to pale, listening to the wild music of the great birds, for a river of life was flowing that night across the sky. Over the elbow of the Cape came the flights, crossing Eastham marsh and the dunes on their way to the immensity of space above the waters. There were little flights and great flights, there were times when the sky seemed empty, there were times when it was filled with an immense clamour which died away slowly over ocean. Not unfrequently I heard the sound of wings, and once in a while I could see the birds— they were flying fast— but scarce had I marked them ere they dwindled into a dot of moonlit sky.”
We’re already well into August as I write my comments on July’s book. The Outermost House is short and easy enough to read. But each passage is a meditation, not to be rushed. Often I stopped to listen to Judy Collins sing “...Sad, deserted shore; your fickle friends are leaving. Ah, but then you know it’s time for them to go. But I will still be here...” And I see myself standing witness beside Beston to Nature’s “unexpected and unappreciated mercies.”
Iris wrote: "We’re already well into August as I write my comments on July’s book. The Outermost House is short and easy enough to read. But each passage is a meditation, not to be rushed. Often I stopped to li..."Indeed you speak the truth. I want to read this book again and again.
Thanks,
Becky