My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. . Henry Beston
About This Quote

Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “My House of the Dunes,” captures the essence of beach life. In this piece, he describes his experiences at a beach on Cape Cod, and his deep and abiding love and admiration for the natural world and its beauty. The first sentence of this essay sets up the theme: “My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September.” He had revisited his Cape Cod home earlier that summer as part of a successful experiment to reduce his dependence on technology and begin living more simply. During that first visit, he writes that he “found no shortcoming in my house” but rather that it was “a house pregnant with possibilities.” As he lingered there over the following months and years, Thoreau became more and more enraptured by the natural world and its beauty.

Here he writes: “A person who sees these things as they are is never more than half alive; so we always want to see them larger than life. A man must be very zealous indeed who does not need to be reminded that these are not all-surrounding mountains or all-embracing oceans.

Source: The Outermost House: A Year Of Life On The Great Beach Of Cape Cod

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