An interesting quote my wife found while scrolling through the internet. She really spoke to her and she wanted to share it with me. I thought it was also wonderful and wanted to share it with everyone else. It is from Henry Beston who is a renown writer and naturalist. He wanted to write about his experiences while on a year long getaway to Cape Cod. He suffered terrible experiences in World War I. This was a needed time to reflect and get back his humanity. And while on this journey he wanted to write about his experiences.
THE OUTERMOST HOUSE
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
– Henry Beston
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