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Mars Will Send No More

Tag Archives: solstice

for winter solstice: henry beston and the sun

15 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in educational

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

book review, books, henry beston, outermost house, solstice, sun

art generated by Midjourney from a lyric in Ship of Gold by Clutch

“A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a trememdous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitve people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline. All these autumn weeks I have watched the great disk going south along the horizon of moorlands beyond the marsh, now sinking behind this field, now behind this leafless tree, now behind this sedgy hillock dappled with thin snow. We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense of and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.”

—Henry Beston; The Outermost House, from Chapter 4: Midwinter, 1928.

1971 Ballantine Paperback Edition

Henry Beston’s memoir about living in a tiny cottage on the beach of Cape Cod contains what I consider some of the most beautiful prose ever written. Merging lush description with poetic meditations on the landscape, seasons, plants, and animals, The Outermost House is almost overwhelmingly rich. As with a batch of well-made fudge, it is perhaps best enjoyed in small chunks rather than consumed all at once. I often can only read one chapter—or even one scene from one chapter—before I must put down the book and ponder, stunned by what I’ve just read.

I discovered the book thanks to its possibly most often quoted passage, which begins “For the animal shall not be measured by man.” I believe that passage from the exquisite chapter about birds is popular among those concerned with animal rights and nature conservation, and I used it as the epigraph for Dekarna Triumphant, the final episode collected in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. The Outermost House has, for the past few years, greatly influenced how my usual third-person-omniscient narrator approaches descriptive prose in the more serious and emotional scenes in the series.

Whether Beston is describing a shipwreck, a sand dune, or the forlorn plight of a doe stranded all night on an island flooded by ice-filled water, his words bring to life the drama, beauty, tragedy, and timelessness of so many aspects of the natural world and her inhabitants. I’ve met many novelists who are concerned with the mechanics of storytelling and world building and character development; and that’s all well and good. But I have rarely if ever met anyone who could write sentence after perfectly crafted sentence like Beston.

I shared the quote at the beginning of this post because it reminds me of a feeling I lost touch with during the last year spent mostly indoors, withdrawn in frustration from the outside world despite living in a state known far and wide for its massive amounts of sunshine. And it seems like a good time to remember that things weren’t always this way, especially as we in the northern hemisphere approach “the last December ebb of his decline”. Here’s to a merry winter solstice and the seasonal rebirth of light.

Collector’s Guide: The Outermost House by Henry Beston is available in many editions on Amazon, including paperback, hardback, ebook, and audiobook. I easily scored a used 1971 paperback edition for just a few bucks, and it was money well-spent.

solstice

20 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

animal inside you, australia, poems, poetry, solstice

art generated by Midjourney

Solstice

My antipodean sister, today is your longest day
but here, our shortest. I grow jealous of your sunlight
though you are the moon who shines in daytime.

I need days that last forever, open and unending
while you crave black-walled rooms and curtains
to deny the outside world and murder it.

These are trivialities. Your heart beats like mine.
It knows the rhythm of the seasons we cannot escape.
They enslave us and they liberate us
and we cannot tell the difference.

Beneath your radiant southern cross
you sing and paint with light to create new worlds.
You, my partner in musical treason,
my inversion who lives one day into the future,

we are not so different: two halves of a sine wave.
My troughs are your peaks
though I cannot touch nor hold your hand.

Our amplitudes are one heartbeat:
the same symphony, the inhalation and exhalation.
Water crashes into sand as far as the eye can see.

You made a home for that part of me too wild to settle down.
I could not repay you with all the gold stolen
from a thousand papist galleons.
But this is no transaction.

The family we are born into
is not the family we meet later,
the one who resonates with us and
cares more for who we are than what we were.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

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