The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

"His writing is taut but lyrical. Few people can evoke a scene with as few words yet so effectively. This matches the sparse, wind-scoured boundary of land and sea that he describes during his year’s sojourn in a cabin in the dunes. The book is also about healing after trauma. Beston was an ambulance driver in the First World War and he sought in the coast an experience “beyond the violences of men”. Despite all the “grim arrangements”, he finds that Nature (his capitalization) is “no cave of pain”, rather our desires and values are humbled next to the beauty, “zest of living”, and “unexpected and unappreciated mercies” of life beyond the human. In our time of collective and individual trauma brought on by growing injustice, climate crisis, and extinction, his words, although in many ways dated, carry a message of renewal. Opening ourselves to the living Earth can heal us, not as an anodyne or escape but as a living, sensual, generative, humbling, and inspiring union with the sources of life. The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea… He truly heard the sea’s many voices. We’re receiving a first-hand account. He deploys verbs wonderfully, evoking the water’s many motions and sounds with vigour and precision. This evokes majesty and terror. Awe, too, sometimes. The book is full of passages that entrain us in the energies of the sea. By the end of the book, reading him becomes a kinaesthetic experience. Our bodily understanding of water is awakened from within. Our muscles, emotions, and intellects understand that the sea has animacy."