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What it argues
Peter Matthiessen's National Book Award-winning account of a two-month trek into the Dolpo region of Nepal in 1973 is several things at once: a naturalist's field journal, a spiritual autobiography, and a meditation on grief. Matthiessen traveled with the field biologist George Schaller, who was studying the Himalayan blue sheep (bharal) and hoped to observe the rare snow leopard. Matthiessen was a practicing Zen Buddhist whose wife, Deborah Love, had died of cancer the previous year. The journey was also, clearly, an attempt to find a way through loss.
The outer narrative follows the trek itself: the ascent from lowland Nepal into the high Himalayan plateau, the grinding physical difficulty, the encounters with Sherpa guides and Buddhist monks, the wildlife observations, and the arrival at the Crystal Mountain and the monastery of Shey Gompa. Matthiessen's naturalist training is evident throughout — descriptions of birds, mammals, and landscapes are precise and unhurried. But the outer journey is always in conversation with the inner one.
What it gets right
- 1.
Grief does not resolve on a schedule, and wilderness travel neither heals it nor escapes it — it simply changes the conditions under which you carry it.
- 2.
Zen practice aims at presence and non-attachment, but Matthiessen's honest accounting shows how often the aim and the actuality diverge.
- 3.
Nature writing at its best is both exact observation and personal disclosure. The two are not in tension; each deepens the other.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was an American author and naturalist, and the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. He cofounded the Paris Review in 1953 and published more than thirty books, including the Watson trilogy of novels and the nonfiction works At Play in the Fields of the Lord and The Snow Leopard, which won the National Book Award in 1979. He was a student of Zen Buddhism from the early 1960s and was ordained as a Zen teacher in 1981. He died in Sagaponack, New York, at the age of 86.
