![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In the eight chapter, titled “Night on the Great Beach,” Beston writes: Illustration from Beastly Verse by JooHee Yoon No one has captured the enchantment of darkness and its eternally reigning queen, the night, more beautifully than writer and naturalist Henry Beston (June 1, 1888–April 15, 1968), who in his 1928 classic The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod ( public library) does for night what Rebecca Solnit has done for walking and Robin Wall Kimmerer for moss. But darkness - like silence, like solitude - belongs to that class of blessings increasingly endangered in modern life yet vitally necessary to the human spirit. It seems like, having never quite grown out of our perennial childhood fear of the dark, at some point in the twentieth century we took Carl Jung’s poetic assertion that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being” a little too literally and set out to illuminate darkness into nonexistence. “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” wrote the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki in his glorious 1933 love letter to darkness, enveloped in a lament about the perils of excessive illumination. ![]()
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