I pick through Lapham's Quarterly every few months, and today, I picked
up the issue titled "Animals." (Each issue has an overarching theme, I
think, because Louis Lapham likes to anthologize.) One of the pieces was from Henry Beston's The Outermost House, written in the 1920s.
Beston observed seabirds on the Cape Cod beach, "each one individually busy for his individual body's sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined. . . . By what means, by what methods of communication does this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time? Are we to believe that these birds, all of them, are machinae, as Descartes long ago insisted, mere mechanisms of flesh and bone so exquisitely alike that each cogwheeled brain, encountering the same environmental forces, synchronously lets slip the same mechanic ratchet? Or is there some psychic relation between these creatures? Does some current flow through them and between them as they fly? . . .
"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."
It's refreshing to read prose that reaches toward a grander plane than scientific (formulaic?) prose. I'm sure that Beston wrestled with the distinction of scientific exposition and, well, poetry. After all, he observed, "Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy."
