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What Do We Hope to Find When We Look for a Snow Leopard?
Nature writers, desperate for a glimpse, trek toward lofty goals—and away from uncomfortable realities.
It could be said that the mongoose belongs to Rudyard Kipling, the mockingbird to Harper Lee, the lobster to David Foster Wallace, the cockroach to Kafka, the spider to E. B. White, and the snake to whoever wrote Genesis. In this sense, the snow leopard, which clearly belongs to no one, belongs to Peter Matthiessen. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...a-snow-leopard
Mathiessen is one of my favorite writers, possibly my favorite "nature writer" (I hate that term), but the Snow Leopard is my least favorite of his nonfiction books. Interesting article though, I think the first half about him is spot on and captures some of what I disliked ( I don't care about escapist spiritual yearnings), and adds a couple more things that i didn't remember because I read it decades ago.
Didn't read the second half about the other guy who I've never heard of, but maybe I will later.
That is a book I read many years ago - many decades - and it stays with me as a quest, not necessarily for a glimpse of a rare cat. The snow leopard is an elusive character in the book but there is much more involved. As I have aged well into my 70s, as a survivor, I understand it, or think I do, as more than what it appears. I went on to read much that Matthiessen wrote that I later encountered but certainly not everything. Much younger, I also read everything I could find by Loren Eiseley and found some echoes of Eiseley in Matthiessen's writing, especially in The Snow Leopard.
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