The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, was published in 1978.

One cold, busy December, just over 26 years ago, I borrowed it from the library, and my diary records the great lungfuls of rarefied air it offered as he describes his journey to a remote Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas:

2 Dec 1992

Started The Snow Leopard this lunchtime. Wonderful, even with [my colleague] James interrupting every five minutes, ferreting around for this, that, or the other... It's stirring stuff -- makes me long to go trekking. It's a description of natural beauty and spiritual search, and yet it is not at all blind to the tragedy of the destruction of nature, or of poverty and disease. It's not at all romanticized..., not at all other-worldly, yet full of the promise of oneness, wholeness, the unity of one's being with the universe, freed from the shell of self.

3 Dec 1992

Reading The Snow Leopard at lunchtime offered a breath of calm. Snow-capped hills, wild plants and birds and animals, the sense of following a man's search for understanding, and longing to get where he has gone. It's a very moving book.

12 Dec 1992

I am struck continuously by the philosophy of living in the present, and ... having faith in life, a "happy-go-lucky spirit, that acceptance which is not fatalism but a deep trust in life".

19 Dec 1992

Finished The Snow Leopard. Felt disappointed that he didn't see it. He was aware of why he didn't see it. Wasn't ready. I'm not ready for anything. I long for serenity, yet spend the day shouting at people, and reading about Seattle, wanting to go there, and wanting to go to Nepal, and wanting to go back to New Zealand.

23 February 1993

I've ordered my own copy of The Snow Leopard. The man helping out in the bookshop said, "I nearly shot a snow leopard once." I must have winced visibly, because he continued, "Yes, I know it's incredible. We just wanted to shoot animals then." Luckily, he didn't manage to kill a snow leopard.

27 September 1993

Went to bed feeling buffeted by it all [panics at work, and news of my mother's worsening health]. Started The Snow Leopard [again] -- I want to read it [day by day] as a diary this year. The cool, dispassionate, yet moved vision of Matthiessen. The high, cold peaks. A sound as if of the wind roaring coldly behind it. Clarity, peace, perspective -- so far from me.

28 October 1993

No time...

I... am behind with The Snow Leopard to the tune of about half a book. Think I'll put it away, and try again next year.

_*_*_

Well, I've finished reading it again, more than a quarter of a century later.

Matthiessen's writing is heart-rendingly beautiful. Most of all, I admire the precision of his language, and his ability to incorporate serious information (scientific, spiritual, and historical) in a digestible way. If only I could write like that...

The Buddhism he describes makes so much more sense now that we've been to Tibet.







But he is not as cool an observer as I had remembered.

He gets angry, frightened, and petty; he occasionally despairs. He is brutally honest about all this, and admirably free of the desire to excuse or justify himself. And despite everything, he stays true to his quest. He does not give up.

My memories were of the landscapes. I had forgotten Tukten, the enigmatic Sherpa-turned-porter who, Matthiessen feels, has some sort of hidden connection with him, and perhaps represented in some strange way his snow leopard.

Matthiessen is a man of his time, though. Since my first reading, I have become familiar with the idea of "orientalism", that pernicious tendency to essentialize the "other", and construe her/him/them as inferior. The term came to prominence through Edward Said's eponymous book -- also published in 1978.

"Confronted with the pain of Asia," Matthiessen writes, "one cannot look and cannot turn away." I cringed a little when I read that. "The pain of Asia"? What on earth can that mean?

I began to notice formulations that had passed me by 26 years ago. Paternalism, for example ("GS", the expedition leader, is concerned about the welfare of the Sherpas, and "rarely permits their childlike natures to provoke him". He talks cheerily of "the freedom of carrying one's own pack, of being 'independent of childish people'").

Or an apparently unquestioning sense of superiority (GS "says he is continually astonished by the poor adaptation of Himalayan peoples to their environment").

Or that annoying tendency to blame the South for an environmental destruction whose roots lie ultimately in the North (a boy who escorts them through a village is branded as a future agent of destruction, predestined to promote deforestation and erosion).

Or evidence of a Romantic idealization of the past: ("[F]rom the police house comes flat tin music from a small radio with weak batteries, the first such noise we have heard since late September. 'A note of the twentieth century in the seventeenth,' GS sighs, as sorry as myself that we have heard it.")

Matthiessen's description of the colonial-era "forthright Briton" who abuses "unruly Tibetans" in a quite revolting fashion is admittedly ironic -- but too lightly so not to jar.

I started to check whether others had been troubled by such traits. They had.

Some of them take their criticism too far, I feel. Joel Whitney, for example. Matthiessen is absolutely not "offering a Rudyard Kipling for the new American century". Bijaya Ghimire, similarly. It is surely an exaggeration to say that "India and Nepal become trivialised through perceiving them as enchanted, exotic lands of spirituality, poverty and death".

Adrienne Eberhard is more nuanced. "[I]n some sections," she comments, "Matthiessen appears similar to the white, European males who led expeditions in the 1700s and 1800s." But "[b]y using the Nepalese landscape and the journey as a metaphor for his own search", he "casts an appropriative gaze rather than undertaking an imperialist action".

These worries aside (and which of us is guaranteed to avoid expressing stances now that might seem appallingly inappropriate a couple of decades down the track?), The Snow Leopard eloquently enables even the dullest of us to become more aware of non-dual consciousness, mindfulness, and acceptance:

"What is changeless and immortal is not individual body-mind but, rather, that Mind which is shared with all of existence, that stillness, that incipience which never ceases because it never becomes but simply IS..."

"When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in awareness of small things... 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... [Avoid] forever getting-ready-for-life instead of living it each day... Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow -- it's quite enough! Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?... In worrying about the future, I despoil the present..."

"Expect nothing... [Practise the] wholehearted acceptance of what is... Tukten's indifference to cold and hardship is neither callous nor ascetic: what it seems to be is calm acceptance of everything that comes, and this is the source of that inner quiet that makes his nondescript presence so impressive."

I think I later forgot even the tiny amount I learned back in 1992.

I still search in vain for stillness, and still fail, almost all the time, to do anything approximating to living in the present.

In 1993, we did our own mountain trek. Nothing remotely as high or dramatic as Matthiessen's, but hard and scary in places. I totally forgot the "expect nothing" thing.



But as part of my Big OE, I intend to learn. So I may well find myself having a third go at this flawed but rich book.