The creator of the Brain Pickings website, Maria Popova, talks about the undeservedly forgotten ideas of the famous writer Henry Beston.
The creator of the Brain Pickings website, Maria Popova, talks about the undeservedly forgotten ideas of the famous writer Henry Beston.
Twice a century - if you're lucky - a writer appears who reminds us of the greatness and glory of our world, that we belong to the Earth, and she belongs to us, and the connection between us is a source of deep wisdom. In the 19th century, such a writer was Henry David Thoreau, in the second half of the 20th century - Annie Dillard. And between them, Henry Beston - the author of delightful prose, building bridges between humanity and nature. His exceptional book Northern Farm describes a year of life on Beston's farm in Maine in the late 1930s. These are immortal reflections on the relationship between nature, humanity and technology, which today sound more important and relevant than ever.
Beston discusses how the mechanized comforts of modern life rob us of the fundamental inconveniences that make us human:
Beston believes this over-security is due to the fact that we grab onto technology in an obsessive pursuit of control. Two decades before Alan Watts extolled the wisdom of insecurity, Beston wrote:
Decades before the legendary psychiatrist Irwin Yalom, who noticed that uncertainty is a critical element in our quest for meaning, Beston talked about the thin line between the fruitful search for knowledge and the stupid destruction of the main riddle of our life: “Perhaps asking too much is a much more dangerous mistake. than it seems to us, a kind of poison for the human soul."
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Beston believes that there is a kind of reciprocity between our tools and our intentions: while our technologies are the fruit of our intentions, they, in turn, influence our intentions.
Beston returns to the tyranny of mindless technology:
What Beston means is that when we do something without a clear, visible goal, we are caught in a squirrel-cage productivity wheel. Satisfaction brings only such a life that arises through the intelligent integration of being and doing, and true being requires that we re-establish relations with the living world. He formulates it this way: "Work done freely outside the walls, work that is an integral part of life, work together with friends - is there anything better?"
Beston laments "increasingly dehumanized and even antihuman" mechanization and ends with a thought that is poignantly relevant today:
