The Outermost House by Henry Beston

In the ten chapters of The Outermost House, Henry Beston writes about the year he spent living in a two-room cottage on the Atlantic-facing beach on Cape Cod in the 1920s. Many of the people on Goodreads who don’t like this book seem to wish it had more of a “plot,” but it isn’t that kind of book. What happens is life: seasons and migrations and weather, and beach-walks at all hours. As I’ve mentioned, I am often more a mood-driven reader than a plot-driven reader, so this was fine with me: I found the book lovely and meditative and enjoyed looking up pictures of many of the plants and birds Beston mentions, from Artemisia stelleriana to the Least Tern. I like the way that Beston writes about the changing light and the ceaseless surf; I like the way he talks about watching the beam from Nauset Light flash on his bedroom wall. I like how he describes how when birds take flight, they move as one; he says they’re “instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into a fugitive pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions” (23). And I like his description of animals in general as “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of light and time” (25).

As far as the human world, Beston writes about his friends in the Coast Guard, how they patrol the beach day and night, and about the shipwrecks from which they rescue (or attempt to rescue) sailors and fishermen. (One of the shipwrecks he writes about, that of the Portland, was before his time at the Cape, but it was interesting to read about nevertheless.) But his descriptions of nature are really the highlight of the book, and I was enthralled whether he was talking about dogfish or terns or phosphorescence or seeing a meteor streak past one night in July. I love phrases like this: “high in space and golden light the myriads of birds drifted and whirred like leaves” (212). Or passages like this:

The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue, burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. (194-195)


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