Here's one of my all time favorite quotes:
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 maginified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them 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 the man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move 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 breathren, 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.
---from Henry Beston, the The Outermost House (1928)
Sure, I like this because I am teaching a nature writing class right now, but I also love it because of its democratic way of seeing the world. And I think all good writers know this: namely, to witness---not from above or below. And without judgment.
Jeesh. Sorry. Perhaps I should put my red velvet robe back in the closet, and stop drinking cognac.
--MJH
