The “Snow Leopard,” published in 1978 is Peter Matthiessen’s now classic account of a journey into the high Himalaya with the naturalist George Schaller. Schaller was on a mission to study the elusive blue sheep and to by chance sight the rare snow leopard. Peter Matthiessen was at the time a student of Zen Buddhism. I’m a novice in the area of his works on the whole. I was familiar with him by name, and only by his affiliation with Zen. He died on April 5 of this year, just 10 days ago. Restless and disaffected in his youth, he broke with his life’s presumed upper class east coast trajectory and became both a CIA agent and the founder of the Paris Review. Matthiessen was published as both a naturalist/journalist and as a novelist. AND he was monk. This brief story of his life drove me straight to buying the first copy of “The Snow Leopard” I could find. I may take to quoting gems here and there…
The Kali Gandaki Gorge, Nepal. Source: insolitanaturaleza.blogspot.com
“Fierce Kali the Black, the female aspect of Time and Death, and the Devourer of All Things, is the consort of the Hindu god of the Himalaya, Great Shiva the Re-Creator and Destroyer; her black image, with its necklace of human skulls, is the emblem of this dark river that, rumbling down out of hidden peaks and vast clouds of unknowing, has filled the traveler with dread since the first human tried to cross and was borne away.”
