The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

To say that Peter Matthiessen's "The Snow Leopard" is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read is such a lame response to its piercing vision of life that I may as well not even try to say anything about it. But try I will.

In the autumn of 1973, the writer Peter Matthiessen set out in the company of zoologist George Schaller on a hike that would take them 250 miles into the heart of the Himalayan region of Dolpo, "the last enclave of pure Tibetan culture on earth." Their voyage was in quest of one of the world's most elusive big cats, the snow leopard of high Asia, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical; Schaller was one of only two Westerners known to have seen a snow leopard in the wild since 1950.

What "The Snow Leopard" does better than any book I can remember offhand is mix the literary and descriptive with thoughtful and instructive.

And what descriptions they are. Here's a throwaway line from the book:

A nutcracker is rasping in the pines, and soon the crows come, down the morning valley; cawing, they hide among long shimmering needles, then glide in, bold, to walk about in the warming scent of resin, dry feel scratching on the bark of the fallen trees.

Not too shabby. But there is also plenty of wisdom to be found here, much of it based on the wisdom of Zen, but Matthiessen includes insights from the west as well. Here's a sample:

William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of "the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal one..."; Melville referred to "that profound silence, the only voice of God"; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found "more divine than yourself." And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaninglessness, for no amount of "progress" can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greed monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

By the time Matthiessen returns to civilization at the end of the book, there is a sadness that pervades his thought. It is a sadness that knows he must rejoin society, that the peace of the moment, the peace of being free from the world will never return. I felt a sadness as well as the book ended, because through Matthiessen's writing, I was able to glimpse, even if it was tangentially, the beauty and struggle of his journey, the beauty and struggle of being free from society.

Grade: A+