From the Editors March 24, 2014 ISSUE

Look up and around you!

The Editors

Last year, readers of the editorial page of The New York Times said goodbye to a columnist whose rural life they had shared for almost 16 years—teacher and author Verlyn Klinkenborg (“Farewell,” December 25, 2013). They had sat with him beside his wood stove while he explained that the only crops on his farm were his “thoughts and feelings and perceptions”—some annual, some perennial.

“But perhaps the most important thing I learned here, on these rocky, tree-bound acres,” he concluded, “was to look up from my work in the sure knowledge that there was always something worth noticing and that there were nearly always words to suit it.”

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