Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With 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. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?
Henry BestonNature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.
Henry BestonThe quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.
Henry BestonIt is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.
Henry BestonWe patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions 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.
Henry Beston