Henry Beston
Henry Beston
American writer and naturalist
(1888-1968)
"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."
~ The Outermost House
