Joy pervades lyrical account of nature’s seasonal passages

Verlyn Klinkenborg looks at the Nativity a little differently than most. “Fear is what the shepherds felt when the good news was announced,” he writes, and then he turns the moment on its head.

“But in the eyes of their flock and in the eyes of the ox and ass depicted in every Nativity, there’s ... implacable mildness.... Their repose is a sign of confidence, of safety, and it washes over the person who gets to bring them their hay, which they accept, every morning, as if every morning were Christmas.”

Such repose and steady confidence fill Klinkenborg’s essays in “The Rural Life,” a collection of beautifully observed moments drawn mostly from the seasons on his small farm in upstate New York and arranged around the calendar year. In a voice reminiscent of E.B. White -- another great translator of the rural life -- he paints a picture of a fading world in colors that are solid and authentic. His joy is evident throughout.

An editorial writer for the New York Times, Klinkenborg writes what he sees and feels and, in his reverie, provides continuity amid often quite disparate subjects. “If deep cold made a sound,” he writes, “it would be the scissoring and gnashing of a skater’s blades against hard gray ice....” And later, “What I like is the visual impairment snow brings with it, the way it obscures some things and defines others, like the wind.”

With such lyricism woven throughout, it is not surprising to encounter in these pages a love of Keats’ odes, with autumn, for instance, “fast asleep in a half-reap’d furrow.” Yet beneath the patina of language, Klinkenborg has set for himself a more difficult task: a daily regimen of noting the world around us -- what is striking, what is humble and what is merely mundane -- where the “simultaneous expectation [is] that every word ... will live forever and be blotted out instantly.”

It is the discipline of encountering the present -- that briefest of periods between past and future -- that makes “The Rural Life” unique. Klinkenborg takes us to a place where one can “count the crows in the field every afternoon” and note that “from a distance the woods in winter look monochromatic, gray with undertones of dull red and olive, as if all the trees were a single species.” It is a place where you might record the passing observation that “[s]omehow

What strengthens his prose and gives texture to the images is his willingness to question matters of birth, life and death. While rejoicing in the “bleating of crickets and the hush of leaves” in June, he still feels a sadness that permeates the passing of life in fall and winter. This cyclic awareness presents itself in more subtle observations: “A gardener anticipates the mortality of his vegetable garden.... In autumn I stare at the demise of my spring plans and realize that ... all those drawings and plottings come down to this, a cornucopia of nettles and soon-to-be-frostbit tomatoes.” Elsewhere he describes “bleak” November, when “the leaves are gone, and the trees seem frayed [and] the clouds have the texture of steel wool.”

The allusions to aging serve to breathe life into the images, so that they are no longer meaningless snapshots but something richer: the all-too-familiar reflections of our own transience. The withering stem of a flower is mirrored in our own creasing skin, receding hairlines and slumping postures. And yet, that is what is needed -- what is essential -- and Klinkenborg reminds us of this, gently but with deathly certainty: “[In May] the field-crickets are already ticking away the seconds of full summer.... Everyone reaches for fullness in summer, but the fullness that most of us know best belongs to the memory of childhood.” Occasionally, with hints at humor, he points it out theatrically: “After the sun burns out, some 5 billion years from now, [our] galaxy ... may collide with the Andromeda Galaxy.... [It] is the kind of celestial happening that belongs on everyone’s worry list.”

As the modern-day drift from nature widens, it might be easy to romanticize rural livelihoods.

But rural existences are vanishing, and those who choose these lifestyles often face harsh conditions that most would flee.

Although Klinkenborg allows himself brief sermons on the sterilization of “chain experiences” in America, “The Rural Life” is without the preachy “angry environmentalist” that one might expect in a collection of essays on nature. In the end, “The Rural Life” is life stripped bare.

What Klinkenborg sees is often decayed or dying, and what he feels is often piercingly cold, especially when the wind-chill approaches 50 below. It is a picture of a life, both urgent and real, fearful and calm, a picture that in the end is enough to make our stay in the city -- cubicles, traffic jams and all -- perhaps more tolerable.