Word: matthiessen
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...Greenfeld · Evita: First Lady, John Barnes · Ezra Pound in Italy, edited by Gianfranco Ivancich, photographs by Vittorugo Contino · First Person Rural, Noel Perrin · People of the Lake, Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin · The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn · The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen...
NONFICTION: A Place for Noah, Josh Greenfeld ∙ Evita: First Lady, John Barnes ∙ First Person Rural, Noel Perrin ∙ Inventing America, Garry Wills ∙ The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn ∙ The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen...
...crude, monotonous diet; dealing with reluctant porters; avoiding the snarling village mastiffs; living with the long silences and terse exchanges on the trail; and the flora, fauna and overwhelming vistas of peaks and valleys at the top of the world. There are frequent outcroppings of autobiography as Matthiessen, scion of a wealthy New York family, graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale and a founder in the 1950s of the Paris Review, writes with painful openness of his wife's death from cancer the year before: "It is not hard to live with a saint, for a saint makes no judgments...
...author also explores the dark division of his Western heart. He invokes Kierkegaard's "sickness of infinitude" and looks back wistfully to a presumed time when ancient mystics and so-called children of nature were said to view existence as whole, seamless cloth. Matthiessen skillfully condenses philosophies, religions and ideas, but pays for stylistic niceties with oversimplifications. To write, as he does, that "the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West" says nothing about the old barbarians who existed in those fabled holistic ages. Was there ever really a time when mankind...
...Matthiessen's excursions into intellectual history and "one's true nature" distract from his sensuous descriptions of nature, and his discourses on Zen often get in the way of his personal reflections. He bears his pilgrim's burden with melancholy dignity, but, ironically, his book lacks an essential Zen element: wit, the lightness of touch that is absolutely necessary when jiggling the web of paradoxes nature has stretched across its secrets...