I Nixon!was in a vet’s office yesterday, having my dog, Nixon, (pictured at right) looked at for an ear infection. While I was in the examination room and the doctor was dealing with Nixon, I started reading a bunch of posters and informational sheets on the wall. One of them really caught my eye. It was a passage from a book by writer-naturalist, Henry Beston, who wrote his famous book, “The Outermost House” in 1926. Traumatized by his experiences in the first World War, Henry had retreated to a tiny house on the very eastern end of Cape Cod to recuperate and regain his internal equilibrium. The passage from the book that caught my eye, and which seems like it was written for Earth Eternal, is this:

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 of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly 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 extensions 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.

I find that to be a very moving passage, and find that it inspires me with thoughts of something epic, alien, and beautiful that lurks just on the edge of our perceptions.