Word: matthiessen
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...SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen; Viking; 400 pages...
Till now Peter Matthiessen's readers have known him primarily as a novelist, a naturalist and a travel writer. The Snow Leopard reveals a more private Matthiessen, a 51-year-old widower searching for peace of mind and, of course, material for a book...
...factual The Cloud Forest (1961) and the fictional At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), Matthiessen and his characters successfully, and at times beautifully, conveyed the dilemma of the Western mind: a need to worship wilderness and a desire to tame it in the name of progress and profit...
...Matthiessen make the trip? "To say I was interested in blue sheep or snow leopards, or even in remote lamaseries, was no answer," he writes. "To say I was making a pilgrimage seemed fatuous and vague, though in some sense, that was true as well . . . I only knew that I was drawn toward the snow mountains, in search of a secret that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching...
...having great expectations. Watching passively and eliminating the distinctions between the observer and the observed are Zen basics that have been familiar to Western readers since Eugen Herrigel told us how the bow and arrow became an extension of his body in Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). Matthiessen has a full quiver and considerable patience; his problem seems to be an overabundance of targets...