Cosmic Outlaws

In the mid-1950s Henry Beston, awestruck by the Great Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts spent a year, including a menacing winter, in his tiny Outermost House living on one of the greatest Atlantic beaches. Here he renewed his core beliefs concerning the elements of humanity.

This important quote comes from the foreword of the 1956 edition his book, he Outermost House:

“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither a completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”


If we ignore nature our humanity ceases to exist.

Overhead, at night we can view the Pleiades, the brightest star cluster in the sky. The cluster is easily found by using the three stars in Orion’s belt as a pointer to the “thumb smudge” on the right, the Pleiades, visible to the naked eye, and easily examined in detail with binoculars. The 400 stars in the Pleiades, born about 20 million years ago, were never looked upon by the eye of a dinosaur, for the great beasts had disappeared for 35 million years, when these young nuclear furnaces took form. The point being that the beauty of the Pleiades is there for the looking. It is a vision that should not be left only for astronomers. It belongs to everyone. We only need to care enough to look up.

As to the wind in the grass, the pounding surf on the Great Beach, and the other simple measures of nature, it is our loss if we ignore them. Republicans would have us forget these simple, everyday delights in lieu of the fear of science jeopardizing their greedy agenda of commercial development with little regard for the environment and their fundamentalist cousins discounting the ancient age (really new arrivals, astronomically speaking) of the 400 stars in Pleiades to support their anti-science myth of a 6,000 year old universe. Are the Republicans and Christian fundamentalists then the cosmic outlaws of which Beston writes?

Beston tells us that beside nature being part of our humanity, humanity is part of nature. They are inseparable and we ignore their commonality at our own peril.