Loss and found

I really don't know where to start the column this week. I could begin with me on my haunches, aged 13, in what was a turbulent year of my childhood, next to a puddle downstream of the irrigation bund near my school, after a night of big rain - self forgotten in observation of the sky in the water, the way blades of grass broke the surface, quite possibly a dragonfly (which I had just learned how to catch). I didn't realise I was observed myself, until a teacher on her way home bent down to share in my observation; she must have been thrilled to see this example of Jiddu Krishnamurti's educational philosophy at work: be still, and watch other things move.

Or with this April morning of sun and breeze, reading a page or two from a travel classic to a disabled relative, taking pleasure in his pleasure, and setting aside for a moment - it's important to be honest - the usual selfish burden of guilt and impatience.

Or, indeed, more lazily with a quote: "I am up before the sun, and make a fire. The water boils as the sun ignites the peaks, and we breakfast in sunshine on hot tea and porridge. 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 feet scratching on the bark of fallen trees."

Reading some of the many, many pieces of tribute written to Peter Matthiessen, who died last week, I am happy and struck that the writers, even those who never met him, take him so personally. I've only ever read one of Matthiessen's 30-odd books, and that is his most famous The Snow Leopard (1978), whence the quote above. But reading that book, more perhaps than any other I have opened, was experience more than act.

Not everyone, I admit, can stomach a travel book composed without a robust storyline, without a string of anecdotes and character sketches, without even the usual teleology of conquest, the metaphors invoking penetration, the striving for the narrow point. Well, there is a little of all that, but if you're looking for the typical "traveller's tale" then you won't find it here.

To describe, briefly: after the death of his second wife, Matthiessen, already a much-published writer and traveller, and an accomplished Zen practitioner (and ex-CIA agent, and, and…), accepts an invitation from the noted field biologist George Schaller to go with him on an expedition to a remote corner of Nepal called the Upper Dolpo. Schaller wants to study the bharal, a sort of goat-antelope, in its untroubled habitat; Matthiessen's near-mystical goal is to see the rarely seen snow leopard that preys on the bharal. For the author, the expedition becomes a pilgrimage somehow tied to his recent loss, but also a search for himself.

This is 1973, so the journey is accomplished on foot, all the way from Kathmandu. It takes weeks, and winter is on its way. The pair must enter, do their work and leave Dolpo before the passes are snowed shut. If they are trapped, they will starve.

The Snow Leopard is not a long book, but Matthiessen's talent makes it extraordinarily nourishing. Nothing is hurried, including the long walk to Dolpo. There is very much description, as in the quote above, but it never grows unbearable; one doesn't skip ahead; Matthiessen has that quality of mindfulness - what alertness! What a memory! What an ability to summon sensation! - that keeps every word he writes true, and fair, and somehow fresh. One cannot lift the eyes away.

The snow leopard, though plainly around, is never seen - and while this is a great disappointment to the author at first, as he trudges back over the passes, strangely it never is for the reader. (Sorry, but "spoiler alerts" are for small children.) It becomes part of the Zen lesson that is this book.

And life is like that!

rraote@yahoo.com