“It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach.” Touch the earth, love the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas rest your spirit in her solitary places. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. The ancient values of dignity, beauty and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration: they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world.

A human life, so often likened to a spectacle on a stage, is more justly a ritual. “Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.” Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.

Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. “Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

The outermost house book