I could use a vacation about now. How about you? I don’t see one on the horizon for awhile, so I guess I’ll be content with the occasional day trip and travels with authors who take me places I’ve never been and/or long to be.
The Outermost House is a narrative about the year Henry Beston spent on Cape Cod in 1925. His intention was to spend two weeks, but “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 that I could not go.”
I visited Cape Cod several times when I was younger, and I loved it. Even though I grew up with fairly easy access to the many beautiful shore spots in New Jersey, there was something different about Cape Cod … even the air. A vacation for me could easily be living near the ocean, sitting peacefully, maybe reading, maybe just watching the tides. The ocean is immensely restorative – her rhythms, her colors, her moods. Nothing really needs to be said when you sit by her side. But I would like the option to enjoy this as a relatively solitary activity most of the time, i.e., not accompanied by the noise, activity and intrusion of beachgoers. And so I will be turning back the clock and enjoying the unspoiled magnificence of nature in this spot on Cape Cod.
Henry Beston and The Outermost House actually came to my attention at least 15 years ago through a magnificent quote from his book:
“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 for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we 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 the extension 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.”
And that’s another reason I’m joining Henry in Cape Cod.
Still A Dreamer 
That sounds like a really interesting book. Is it still in print, I wonder. And how did your reading of the ones bought at the book sale go?
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It is absolutely still in print! As a matter of fact, a 75th Anniversary edition was published not that long ago. If your library doesn’t have it, it’s on Amazon, real cheap if a used copy, I suspect.
I am still reading those and numerous other books that come my way. Among those from the sale were The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, Light Between the Oceans, Defending Jacob, and more than I can recall at the moment. Plus I have a friend who lends me some titles from their own collection, and some I’ve been borrowing from the library. If nothing else, I continue to read.
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I’ve read the first two. Looking forward now to Louise Penny’s next book in the Inspector Gamache/Three Pines series. She is a lovely writer, with books on the New York Times bestseller lists.
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Another author to put on my list! I have a “fridge list” – to look for at the next annual book sale or to borrow from the library when what I want isn’t jumping off my shelves (though I honestly don’t know how that’s even possible!)
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Amen, sister. Would love time away, yet these gardens keep me tethered and the need to make weekly income until the end of October reduces my bliss to snippets in the early mornings. Even my reading is reduced to weekly rags from town. And the chores are not finished…
I welcome the cooler months, with fewer biting insects and low humidity, and dormancy when I too can become quiet and still. I do envy those many who can afford a trip to the ocean, yet I am destined to wait and hope. D.
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You and me both, Diane. I do not envy you being out in the humidity with the biting insects, and non-stop gathering, cooking, etc. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t get a dormant period from work at any time during the year, just what I make for myself in occasional little blocks of reading during the week, and yes, I do have the weekend to mostly call mine. Either way you cut it, it’s tiring.
I’ll meet you in Cape Cod … bring books! 🙂
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Hello, hello.
I’ve had short stays waterside–oceans and lakes–and well, the conversation with the water never ends.
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Good for you! I live just a couple houses from the river, but it’s the conversation with the ocean that I long for … yes, that never-ending one. Happy to see you back!
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Indeed, the river is not the same as the ocean–and vice versa. 🙂
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Lovely to read your thoughts about this book and Cape Cod – a place I’ve always wanted to go. The book is full of haunting descriptions and makes me long for a little ‘outermost house’ of my own.
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You and me both. I don’t know that I’d be as resourceful and brave as he needed to be at times, but just the idea of it …
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