For this, Henry Beston gets full marks:
What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy.
(Quoted from page 354 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
For a brief biography of Henry Beston, click here (there, be sure to view “How to write like Henry,” and other goodies). For images of or relating to Henry Beston, click here.
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