ISOLATION

We isolate now, reluctantly. The pandemic has plunged us into surreal global circumstances. It’s entering the history books. It is far from over.

Most of you know about Thoreau and his cabin. More of you might not know of Henry Beston who built a little cabin — a little house, actually –on the dunes of outer Cape Cod in the Twenties. It’s worth exploring and sharing his account of that nature-filled isolation in that twenty-by-sixteen dune dwelling not far from the pounding surf. He called it the Fo-castle. His book on his time in that house on the dunes is called, The Outer Most House. 

I recall the sadness when that little house that had withstood many storms was washed out to sea during the cataclysmic Blizzard of ’78. But a replica was built in its place, and a society of nature lovers and preservationists have sprang up long ago in Beston’s memory.

Bottom line here: we mortals have been known to seek out isolation and to have benefitted memorably from it. Just a thought. No, you don’t have to build a cabin. Just recall the diagnosis of Pascal, that many of our problems come from an inability to sit alone quietly in a room.