Shellshocked

ASK a naturalist or nature poet to catalog the differences between city people and country people and most will say something about attentiveness. City people are too immersed in the channel-changing din of urban velocity to be distracted by the little things that people living close to nature notice, like a spring that arrives a week earlier than it did the year before or a change of schedule in a deer family’s weekly run to the creek.

Nebraska poet Ted Kooser has written that country people possess “a wolf’s attention to change,” in that no alteration in landscape, no matter how slight, goes unnoticed. In rural environments, change is not dramatic or big, he says, but minute and singular; the more time you spend among trees and grass, among barns and fields and two-lane highways that lead to one-lane roads, the more the slightest change catches your attention. Like a wolf, any detail will turn your head, because after all, it must. In nature, attention is not a theory or an art but a tool of survival -- awareness as a way of life.

Verlyn Klinkenborg is neither naturalist nor nature poet, but he writes about nature with the science of the former and the soul of the latter. In “Making Hay” and his New York Times editorial column, “The Rural Life” (which grew into the book of the same name, a stunning calendar-year almanac centered around four seasons at his upstate New York farm), Klinkenborg explores the interface between people and nature with a wolf-like attention to detail. He is a master of the microscopic. To read him is to wonder: How does he notice all those little things? And how does he make all those little things, seemingly meaningless and mundane, add up to such big ideas about beauty, grace and the mysteries of natural life? How is he so aware?

In an essay that accompanied “Straight West,” a book of ranching photographs by his wife, Lindy Smith, Klinkenborg lamented that most urbanites had lost the ability to look into an animal’s eye and understand that animals see us as much as we see them. The loss was equal, he wrote, to “an abandoning -- of the animal creation and of ourselves.”

In “Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile,” Klinkenborg’s first move away from the American landscape and from strictly nonfiction writing, he doesn’t just look into the animal’s eye, he tries to see through it -- from the perspective of an 18th century tortoise living in Selborne parish, in the garden of English clergyman and famed naturalist Gilbert White.

The real Timothy’s shell sits in London’s Natural History Museum, and White is best known for his classic 1789 work of nature writing, “The Natural History of Selborne.” Instead of writing a conventional book about White, Klinkenborg has chosen to invert the naturalist’s craft. This is Selborne through Timothy’s eyes; this is White under observation by a tortoise. Which makes “Timothy” a work of both speculative naturalism and speculative biography, with Klinkenborg grounding his fiction in text culled from White’s book as well as the clergyman’s letters, receipts and sermons, then letting his own imagination -- so well-tuned to the particulars of the natural world -- do the rest.

When we meet Timothy, the 81-year-old tortoise is headed back to the asparagus, poppies and lettuce of White’s parish garden after an escape attempt. The first thing we learn is just how well Timothy understands those odd creatures on two legs who somehow manage never to fall down. (“Pride of the vertical,” says the tortoise. “Pomp of warm-bloodedness.”) Timothy can escape because he is slow and because human attention, even out in the Southampton countryside, does better with obvious action than incremental torpor. “Quickness draws their eye,” the tortoise says. “What they notice they call reality. But reality is a fence with many holes, a net with many tears. I walk through them slowly. My slowness is deceptively fast.”

Before we learn that Timothy was snatched from the Turkish coast and that life in Selborne consists mainly of unpleasant annual weigh-ins and autumn-spring hibernations in the warm earth below the parish, Klinkenborg makes it clear that this is more than a book about a sapient tortoise. It is a story of differing realities and competing perspectives that offers a critique of humanist universalism. What if reptiles were humanists just as humans are naturalists? What if what we know of the natural world came not from an 18th century clergyman but from an 18th century tortoise? “Humans believe that the parish of Earth exists solely for their use,” Timothy thinks. “But martins brood among the eaves in the street as if the eaves had been hung for them. Coal-mice in the overhang of a thatched house as if thatched for them.” To whom does Earth belong?

Klinkenborg explores this question in runs of clipped, often guarded sentences that are closer to free verse than his usual long-form descriptive prose. In “The Rural Life” and “Making Hay,” details unfold in pilings and cascades, minuscule specks of light that add up to glaring vision; in “Timothy” they step out and sparkle one at a time, members of an infinite army of the small, restrained and measured, gently hinting at the greater vision they’re a part of. This, for example, is how Timothy first describes Selborne: “Willows flower in the coppices. Mistle thrush nests in the garden-traffic to save her brood from magpies.” And this, Timothy’s first autumn: “Constant alarums. Greenfinch in the polyanths! Blackbird in the cherry tree!”

In this sense, “Timothy” is a small book about a small reptile in a natural world full of bountiful small things. Yet Klinkenborg is also asking larger, sweeping questions about the relationship between humans and animals and what these relationships say about human character. Throughout his account of life in Selborne, Timothy counters White’s views of tortoises as “abject” reptiles adrift in stupor and primal instincts, lowly creatures on whom longevity is wasted. Timothy, it turns out, is wildly thoughtful, opinionated and sensitive, driven as much by instinct, as White assumes, as by reason, which White does not.

“Poor embarrassed reptile,” says White. “But what have I not survived?” thinks Timothy. What humans boast of as enterprise, the tortoise rejects as misfortune, “a cruel slavery” that always leaves humans wanting more than their already plentiful lot. He even laments that “if a cabbage were human, it would aspire to become a lettuce.”

Most of all, Klinkenborg imbues Timothy with a profound sense of apartness, a lonely being at home in the space of a singular shell. It is the author’s greatest triumph: He makes us believe we are reading not just the thoughts of a tortoise but those of a Turkish tortoise, uprooted from the craggy coast of the Mediterranean to spend cruel, solitary winters in a British garden. Timothy is useless to this new human community, and Klinkenborg has us empathizing with the depressed and misunderstood reptile: “No song worth hearing. No skin worth tanning. No conversation worth taking down. No capers worth watching. Only the one autumnal trick, going underground, and the spring one, coming up again.”

To add to the tortoise’s gloom, White cannot even get Timothy’s gender right. He, we learn midway through the book, is a she who has been neutered by the freeze of winter. With no eggs to show for herself, Timothy is thought to be a male, proof to the pensive tortoise that even the orderly mind of the most attentive human naturalist can miss the most basic things.

Worse, White gets wrong what is for Timothy perhaps the biggest truth of all: No matter how hard humans work to trump up their distinctiveness, to mark their difference from animals with claims to reason and divine faith, they belong to the same earthly community. Timothy wonders how White could devote his life to natural history and then deliver sermons to his parishioners that promise a human heaven free of swifts and rooks. “Judge the naturalist as narrowly as he judges the rest of creation,” Timothy warns. “Man of system. Man of the cloth. But blood, brain, bowels, and bile nonetheless.”

When Timothy tries to escape from White’s Selborne garden, it is this she wants to escape, to be a tortoise free of human intervention, away from human arrogance, away from the manicured garden and its design of “painstaking paradise.”

She wants to go back to the unplanned, rocky ruins of the sea. Or at the very least, back down in the warm earth where she may stay forever, happy enough to face the great mystery of existence -- “Why any creature is allotted time on this earth” -- with a calm awareness no biped could ever dream of. *