Some seem to know too much what nature is for to be able to enjoy it. In the wild, those things are often unavoidable, but sometimes a naturalist actually looks forward to them, because they heighten the senses and allow one to become more creatural, enter deeper into the landscape and feel rapture. Although nature writers vary in their motives and habits, they tend to have much in common. Indeed, ''The Norton Book of Nature Writing,'' a hefty new anthology, is really a sort of village of like-minded souls that sprawls across time rather than the countryside. Although few of its inhabitants have ever met, they have hunted in the same light-dappled woods, learned from the same masters, angled in the same streams of thought and drunk from the same well, whose rim is the horizon.
Most writers feel alien and freakish to begin with, and a nature writer feels it even more so.
And a nature writer is often thought of as a curiously dysgenic beast, part mystic, part oddball and overly solemn. One has precious little sense of community, which is why I'm indebted to the Norton anthology. This gathering of naturalists gives one a chance to compare and establish the lineages between them. The editors, Robert Finch and John Elder, have clearly chosen the selections with such correspondences in mind. They note in the short, useful prefaces to each excerpt how it figures in the author's work and how the author fits into the genre.