“‘On my solitary dune’. The Outermost House di Henry Beston: solitudine e spiritualità dell’Oceano”

The experience of solitary life recorded in Henry Beston’s _The Outermost House_ (1928) represents a new and different version of the theme of hermitic retirement in the wilderness and in the desert, typical of American tradition and literature (cf. H.D. Thoreau’s _Walden, or Life in the Woods_). Beston did not withdraw himself in the endless sterile expanses of a desert, but his experience of solitude in front of the mighty Atlantic Ocean at Cape Cod is almost the same. It is evidence of the writer’s deep spirituality and religiosity, of his reverence, awe and gratitude for the sacredness of Nature, and of his respect, concern, and pietas for all living beings. These latter characteristics make of him a precursor of environmental literature and of the biocentrism and anti-speciesism which developed in the second half of the XX c. and later.