Chapter 43: A Universe of Harmony
A UNIVERSE OF HARMONY
IN THE evenings here in my cottage on the Cape I have been reading a book about the Cape, Henry Beston’s The Outermost House. It tells in exquisite language of a year he spent on Cape Cod’s Great Beach, alone in a house on the sand dunes overlooking the Atlantic. The beauty and the strength and the terror of nature are described with deep understanding.
Many forces mingle in the surf of a storm —the great earth rhythm of the waves, the violence of wind, the struggle of water to obey its own elemental law. Out of the storm at sea come the giants and, being giants, trip far out, spilling first on the outer bar. Shoreward then they rush, breaking all the way. Touching the beach, they tumble in a roar lost in a general noise of storm. Trampled by the wind and everlastingly moved and lifted up and flung down by the incoming seas, the water offshore becomes a furious glassiness of marbly foam; wild, rushing sheets of seethe fifty feet wide border it; the water streams with sand.
Under all this move furious tidal currents, the longshore undertow of outer Cape Cod. Shore currents here move in a southerly direction; old wreckage driftwood is forever being carried down here from the north. Coast Guard friends often look at the box and stick I have retrieved and say, “Saw that two weeks ago up by the light.”[17]
Beston tells of the wonderful obedience of every aspect of creation —the winds, the tides, the migrations of birds, the rhythm and play of light, sound, fragrance, and color all moving in a perfect harmony as though at the direction of an unseen baton. One of the stranger phenomena described is the migration of all alewives, relatives of the herring which the Indians used to use to fertilize their corn hills.
These alewives of Weymouth come up out of the sea, and from heaven knows just where out of the sea. They run up Weymouth Brook, are stopped by a dam, are fished out in a net, dumped into barrels of water, and carted overland in a truck to Whitman’s Pond. I have watched them follow currents in the pond, once they have been spilled out into it. Then comes, perhaps, a sense of arrival and intended time; each female lays from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand glutinous eggs, these drop to the bottom, drift along the mud, and ooze and attach themselves as chance directs. The spawning females and the males then go over the dam and back to sea, the herring born in the pond follow them ten months or a year later, and then comes another spring and a great mystery. Somewhere in the depths of ocean, each Weymouth-born fish remembers Whitman’s Pond, and comes to it through the directionless leagues of the sea. What stirs in each cold brain? What call quivers as the new sun strikes down into the river of ocean? How do the creatures find their way? Birds have landscape and rivers and headlands of the coast, the fish have —what? But presently the fish are “in” at Weymouth, breasting the brook’s spring overflow to the ancestral pond.
That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self-life to the will of life universal?[18]
Wind and wave, tide and storm, the migrations of birds and alewives are elements in the throb and swell and rhythm which underlie the wonderful harmony of the universe. We have been talking about the first thing that makes marriage work —the acceptance of divine hierarchy —which is, it seems to me, another aspect of this harmony. The man and woman who recognize that they are heirs together of the grace of life move in time to the rhythm, accepting their boundaries as do the waves, yielding their self-life to the Will of Life Universal (which Henry Beston didn’t capitalize), moving always toward the final fulfillment and joy —the perfect Music —which is the Will of God.