[The Snow Leopard is a kind of book] with which we are becoming familiar lately; it is part travelogue, part autobiography, part historical discourse, and predominantly lay sermon, in the shape of a quest narrative…. [The] bias of the lay sermon is toward Zen Buddhism; and to the eye of a layman, the exposition of Buddhism seems straightforward, nicely written, but not very new. One certainly need not have slogged through the snows of Nepal to discover it. There is of course no reason to anticipate novelty in the explanation of an essentially quietist philosophy which is, by now, at least a thousand years old; but the curious reader might understandably ask whether, if he'd been in full possession of his own philosophical premises, Mr. Matthiessen would have embarked in the first place on such a strenuous and dangerous expedition….
The portion of [The Snow Leopard] describing the expedition itself, it should be said at once, is brilliantly and vividly written. The author has dealt frequently and knowingly with natural scenery and wild life; he can sketch a landscape in a few vivid, unsentimental words, capture the sensations of entering a wild, windy Nepalese mountain village, and convey richly the strange, whinnying behavior of a herd of wild sheep. His prose is crisp, yet strongly appealing to the senses; it combines instinct with the feeling of adventure…. The Zen reflections and discourses on the history of the philosophy are more watery; they often seem to resolve themselves into Sanskrit abstractions like samadhi, sunvata, kensho, satori, and prajna—terms for which evidently no adequate English equivalents exist, though what precisely their special meaning and intensity amount to, the reader must try to guess. The combination of these elements leaves all the more mysterious the explanation of why Matthiessen was present on this expedition at all. People asked him this question, it seems: he always had trouble telling them…. He sought, evidently, some sort of illumination or purification, and seems to have got it momentarily, though it is hard to express. (p. 8)
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2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Matthiessen, Peter 1927–: Critical Essay by Robert M. Adams Access Pass.
