He listens to the myriad voices of the surf, and attempts, in words, a faithful notation of the music he has heard. He watches on winter nights as fishing schooners, last vestiges of the age of sail, move slowly beyond the bar, or come to frozen grief upon it. Here, to a tiny house set alone on a dune above the sea, a man has come in solitude to watch, and listen, and bear witness. Dominated by ocean and weather, this landscape has been long inhabited but never domesticated. The time and place, Cape Cod in the mid-1920's: a wild, windswept outpost of the land. The Outermost House presents us with a time, a place, and a man. This subjective quality distinguishes nature-writing from natural history, and keeps it fresh: the source is inexhaustible, and each inquiry unique as the personality which makes it. Henry Beston produced a masterpiece on Cape Cod, but he did not say the last word treading the same sacred ground today, John Hay and Robert Finch point to signs that only they have noticed. With nature-writers, the lens is personality - and that makes all the difference. The American Southwest of Edward Abbey is one place and although the geographical territory may be the same in the writings of Wallace Stegner or Terry Tempest Williams, our sense of it - the things we notice and choose to look at, the way we look at them and the questions we ask - is different. When we think of Henry Beston's Cape Cod, Annie Dillard's Blue Ridge, Rachel Carson's Maine coast or Florida Keys, we imagine not a clinical, purely objective landscape but a personal one, a place colored by the particular sensibility, the individual filter, through which it passed. Urn:oclc:858586135 Scandate 20110329042823 Scanner best nature-writing, it seems to us, brings together a place, a time, and a personality in such a way that, after we've read the book, the writer's experience, and something of his or her personality, seems to be our own.

OL452794W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 83.46 Pages 262 Ppi 514 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0345256379 Urn:lcp:outermosthouseye00best:epub:dc79bd4b-9b25-46ed-8a40-38a7f35b85d4 Extramarc OhioLINK Library Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier outermosthouseye00best Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3xs6jz7r Isbn 0805019669Ĩ7036090 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition Urn:lcp:outermosthouseye00best:lcpdf:b1eade3b-fd28-4acf-a3cb-5e9cf6b8a1d8 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:10:02 Boxid IA135205 Boxid_2 CH104701 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Curatenote shipped Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1st Owl book ed.

The outermost house by henry beston