The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

This is the account of a journey to the dazzling Tibetan plateau of Dolpo in the high Himalayas. In 1973 Matthiessen made the 250-mile trek to Dolpo, as part of an expedition to study wild blue sheep. It was an arduous, sometimes dangerous, physical endeavour: exertion, blisters, blizzards, endless negotiations with sherpas, quaking cold. But it was also a 'journey of the heart' - among the beauty and indifference of the mountains Matthiessen was searching for solace. He was also searching for a glimpse of a snow leopard, a creature so rarely spotted as to be almost mythical.

Why I Picked It Up

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I picked up The Snow Leopard last year because of a man. Shamelessly. (That's rare for me, but the rabbit holes and recs I go down at various points are always influenced by what—or who—I'm curious about, and I love that people can affect me that way.) We both have a certain reverence for existential curiosity, the outdoors, and self-reliant intensity (among other similarities.) I'm a travel writer obsessed with sensory contrast and endurance, and he's a philosophical guy in a career that pushes you past physical and mental limits. Both "seekers," as the author would say. There's a lot of overlap there in terms of curiosity, rhythms, values, etc,. and it seems like Peter Matthiessen might live in the intersection of our respective tastes.

I personally adore The Paris Review, and find Matthiessen's backstory helping found it (as a cover for his work with the CIA in the '50s) beyond fascinating too. So I've been carting around my gorgeous orange Penguin copy of The Snow Leopard for months now, chipping away.

About the Book

Some people will say The Snow Leopard is meant to be nature writing. Peter Matthiessen has a very observational style, peppering each page (or day, in this sense, as it's written like a punctuated diary) with a slew of names, locations, and references. He gets sometimes overwhelmingly specific—which I appreciate, although the craft brat in me wants him to ground the reader more too.

Others will say The Snow Leopard is about complicated grief—as this journey into the Himalayas is largely for the purpose of seeking Zen or oneness or some sort of cohesion after the painful death of his wife after a tumultuous relationship; before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, they were hurtling towards divorce. (More on this later.)

And then, of course, the book is very Beat Generation in that Matthiessen is on a spiritual quest examining his relationships to existentialism and religion, and his sense of time overall—how much to weigh the future and the past in a present that is startlingly tactile in mountains that seem alive. (Y'all know I love sentient mountain imagery.)

Immediately, I felt echoes of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts's negotiations with Buddhism, and After the North Pole by Erling Kagge (a more recent release.)

What I Thought

The first time I sat down with The Snow Leopard, it wasn't quite gripping me.

I liked it, but again—Matthiessen doesn't shroud his writing in much personal significance, and I'm a bit of a cynic about that as it relates to his treatment of third-world countries i.e. why would he receive a National Book Award for The Tree Where Man Was Born when a resident could have written or transcribed the same? It feels a bit white savior to me, especially since he has a tendency to describe those who live in the place he visits as "childlike" and "defenseless" or ignorant, especially in a moment when GS waxes poetic about how they both did this journey all alone (conveniently ignoring their hired Sherpas and porters.)

So, where I land: I want to evaluate his writing as I would for anyone else, which means I don't automatically view straightforward, with little personal detail, as significant because of who it's coming from. I feel the same about Joan Didion and what's considered stark or poignant in literary circles.

As a travel writer myself, I do think we somewhat have a responsibility to differentiate between what I call "place and placebo" — the objective qualities of a given location, plus the subjective role it plays for you — and Matthiessen can be wobbly here in that he has (in my opinion) some blind spots when evaluating the latter. He can be rather all-or-nothing, which is why his moments of despair in transitioning out of his mountain clarity can be so powerful. Or his moments of awe within it.

“Here in the secrets of the mountains, in the river roar, I touch my skin to see if I am real; I say my name aloud and do not answer.”

In this case: Matthiessen's escaping from the responsibility or confusion of life at home. He gets a certain clarity on his quest for the snow leopard because of his ability to ignore the rhythms of reality, and that introduces a core question of the book as it talks about the varied experiences of dreaming vs. waking up too: how do you decide which one is "real"? My question is: okay, is it a genuine enlightenment he experiences on this trip, or is he just experiencing what most vacationers do: freedom defined by not having to confront the contours of home, especially as he evaluates this terror of permanence vs. impermanence?

“'Do you realize we haven't even heard a distant motor since September?' And this is true. No airplane crosses such old mountains. We have strayed into another century.”

My primary emotional issue, you could say, with the book is that he ignores the toll of his individual freedom on his kids, who are likely still suffering from the loss of their mother. A middle-aged male adventurer having to ignore domesticity in favor of his life's mission isn't a new phenomenon (and Erling Kagge discusses it similarly in After the North Pole, which I also have thoughts about, because certain narratives are better than others in acknowledging the burdens this places on those who are keeping their family lives and responsibilities intact without thanks.) Matthiessen, meanwhile, just doesn't acknowledge the weight he's placing on his eight-year-old son who's begging him to be home by Thanksgiving. Or in wanting to give a beggar child a new life, but neglecting his own kid. I'm not sure I believe in this mode of self-reliance if it doesn't integrate accountability into the picture too, or if it tiptoes around points of rupture or responsibility. That's just vacation, my friend, albeit an untraditional one.

“I hope your mountain boots are still good. I hope you are having a good time.”

“Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us...”

I found this to be most dissonant near the end when he's preaching a moment of enlightenment, but then reveals that he'd specifically left his mail unopened in case it surfaced issues he didn't want to deal with. (In fairness, at this point, he only had a few days left and couldn't get back even if he wanted to—but he mainly doesn't want to spoil his sense of being unmoored by time.) Isn't that just escapism and blissful ignorance then, if you know it will all surge over you when you finally confront it?

Then again, I feel like this is why I'm perpetually fascinated by traditional accounts of the hero's journey, and questions of what it does to you to leave and return. Matthiessen is entitled to his time and trip alone, so I'm not implying he shouldn't have gone (I obviously think there's value in parents continuing to live full and expansive and adventurous lives), just that his selective attention to home makes some blind spots clear. For him to talk about the philosophy that he can find joy in limitation and duty in living a genuine life that's brave and generous—well, yeah, that's easy to say, but are you actually doing it holistically or just in convenient sections? Is anyone able to do it holistically at all?

I do feel like the strength in the self-sovereignty worldview comes from confronting your flaws and breaking through them, not just tucking them away to reflect on in scenarios in which you are pleasantly able to intellectualize them from enough distance to hypothetically solve them in a way that cannot possibly tarnish your ego or sense of self. Or else you're not actually putting yourself in the position to be changed—but again, here's reflection on what "moments of grace" really means.

“My head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions—mail, telephones, people and their needs—and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens.”

I'm not giving him fatherhood credit for a flash of a moment thinking about his son in a skeleton Halloween costume, unless he's just keeping any sentimental reflections private (which would be fair), because someone else is shepherding an eight-year-old through grieving his mom. I would be understanding if he acknowledged the moral dissonance of seeking Zen on a larger scale while ignoring what he could personally do for others, but maybe that's just the Stoic in me speaking. You can do it! Just acknowledge it, please. Honor the sacrifices appropriately.

“To live with a saint is not difficult, for a saint makes no comparisons, but saintlike aspiration presents problems. I found her goodness maddening, and behaved badly. My days with D were tainted with remorse; I could not abide myself when near her, and therefore took advantage of my work to absent myself on expeditions around the world—once I went away for seven months.”

Shouldn't genuine enlightenment consolidate the wholeness of everything, including what you're abandoning or avoiding? Otherwise, it's just blissful ignorance, or perhaps compartmentalization—which is reassuring, absolutely, but not quite the same as integrating your shadow self, past and present, etc,. into one singular now. So I found that to be a frustrating dissonance, but discussions like that are why the book carries existential weight for me and others.

In summary, openness to experience that ignores the impact of others can sometimes feel empty to me, because if you have to avoid others to preserve your clarity, then your escape may be more about compartmentalization than transcendence. (Of course, there's a line: I just think the people who bring out the best in you might make you feel the gap between selves first, and it's not helpful to deify them so you can escape internal discomfort.) The bowl anecdote killed me. If he's going to go full-on Beat Generation, let's roll with the Jack Kerouac definition then.

“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now. — Jack Kerouac”

My view is that you can see the beauty and the flaws in something at the same time, whereas it sometimes feels like Matthiessen either needs to either completely romanticize something or diminish it entirely to truck onward. I, like Matthiessen, think frequently about simplicity and lightness and ignorance, and when one turns into another.

“The sense of having one's life needs at hand, of traveling light, brings with it intense energy and exhilaration. Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.”

“But sometimes for a day or more, I lose this feel of things, my breath is high up in my chest, and then I cling to the cliff edge as to life itself. And of course it is this clinging, the tightness of panic, that gets people killed: 'to clutch,' in ancient Egyptian, 'to clutch the mountain,' in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified 'to die'”

To his credit (and arguably in my favorite moments of the book), Matthiessen talks about this gap frequently—the distance between the version of yourself that you are, and who you'd like to be. Some reminded me of Charlie from Flowers for Algernon, some reminded me of Marcus Aurelius, and some reminded me again of the Beats. And I loved this separation of "I" versus the world—when you feel disparate vs. when you feel connected (and scientifically, this is why I insist awe is the answer to all of this: preserving the sense of singularity you need as an independent explorer, while making you feel connected to others and the greater system of our Pale Blue Dot.) Scientifically, that's literally when you feel best—because you're escaping the dopaminergic pursuit of what Matthiessen calls these "gobbets of raw experience" with the threshold for satisfaction getting higher and higher and higher.

“I rest in the warm sun, enveloped by the soft shroud of white emptiness; my presence in such emptiness seems noticed, although no one is here.”

“Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.”

He speaks often of this sense of "being watched" while alone as signaling the restlessness of his quest—maybe the craving to be witnessed? Awe can make you feel 'seen' while alone, and together without needing words. I also have this note I just found in the margins of my copy that I made a while ago that I rather like:

"Confrontation by people must be judgmental. By place—unavoidable and therefore okay?"

that might speak to why Matthiessen is comfortable with a journey or a Sherpa revealing this to him but wouldn't accept the same realization from his domestic life. And this here might be the difference between what is a cycle versus what's a hero's journey of integration. So basically: I should read a Matthiessen book published after this and see how how he perceives himself to have changed.

And then Matthiessen does have these moments of awareness of these pitfalls within his worldview too, cloaked in the despair of a singular mood or "crash out" (as the kids would call it these days.) He realizes the cost of this. Related to the real vs. not real discussion: I think both are equally real to him, and his perceivably enlightened mode is just his preference, which again speaks to my doubt as to whether or not he's truly integrated.

“I am aware of all that is hollow in myself, all that is greedy, angry, and unwise.”

“Whatever the reason, I am coming down too fast—too fast for what? And if I am coming down too fast, why do I hurry? Far from celebrating my great journey, I feel mutilated, murderous: I am in a fury of dark energies, with no control at all on my short temper...”

What I Loved & Themes I've Thought About

• crisp, stunning, searing mountain and imagery of course
• the common miracles you find in the margins of any physical misery (contrast)
• discussions of multiple versions of the self (see: Every You, Every Me)
• tension between solitude and connection, cohesion and detachment
• the wisdom of silence and the outdoors (love, always)
• moments of clarity being sheer, temporary "crystallizations of mind"
• forever theme: permanence and loss, what to hold onto
• talking about the wild innocence (and timelessness) of childhood
• man's fear of meaninglessness
• state of grace
• what it means to forgive yourself, but avoid the forgiveness of others
• Western minds absorbing Eastern thought (and whether that's possible)
• a similar frustration with words being unable to capture the awe of an experience
• Einstein's Dreams-esque meditations on timelessness
• Travel writer question for you: can you only experience timelessness as a visitor, when your daily rhythms are divorced from "reality?" Again, veering into his existentialist questions of what exactly is most real.

Lines I Loved

“How strange everything seems. How strange everything is. One "I" feels like an observer of this man who lies here in this sleeping bag in Asian mountains; another "I" is thinking about Alex; a third is the tired man who tries to sleep.”

“The armor of the 'I' begins to form, the construction and desperate assertion of separate identity, the loneliness...”

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”

“The effort to find ordinary words for what I have seen in this extraordinary time seems to have dissipated a kind of power, and the loss of intensity is accompanied by a loss of confidence and inner balance;”

“Yet as long as I remain 'I' who is conscious of the void and stands apart from it, there will remain a snow mist on the mirror.”

“Also, I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do. ”

Overall Thoughts

This was a great read for me in that I do have a lot I want to book club about it—lots to love, and lots to argue a little about too. I get a lot of value from The Snow Leopard, and I also have some tipping points of engagement with it (so to speak) that make me question Matthiessen's reliability as a narrator. But that goes back to the whole point of the book with enlightenment being an ongoing process—that you'll hit a moment of profound clarity then find yourself back muddied up in the questioning. Philosophy revises; people do too.

And then, from a travel writer POV—it's, of course, easier to find yourself on the road, divorced from the mundanity of home and the weight of finitude and responsibility there. So what happens when you try to bring it back with you, or is the answer just to plan another trip away? (I've been thinking a lot about these periods of significant transition lately, and how most struggles seem to originate there—which is what Matthiessen proves too in his "comedown" from the mountains.)

For fans of:

After the North Pole by Erling Kagge; Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger; The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac; Alan Watts; Awe by Dacher Keltner; Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Hayes; Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; etc,.