A Poet of the Landscape
I love stories with moody settings. This is why I’m recommending The Outermost House, even though it’s not a work of fiction. Beston’s lyrical writing captures seasonal changes and sensory details with such beauty. In fact, he even called himself the “poet of the landscape.”
How lovely is that?
In my own writing, I work to capture the moods of nature. Using only language, this can be a challenge. But I believe being enormously inspired by nature, like Beston, certainly helps.
It’s the simple things of which give me the greatest pleasure: the way the sun plays on the surface of the lake, the clouds casting lazy shadows across the valley floor, the way sounds of the forest become amplified in the darkness during summer nights.
Beston felt that “whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to nature…touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.”