DNF.

Damn. This book started out so well.

However, after only a few pages it seems to have turned into a version of Log from the Sea of Cortez, complete with philosophical and religious musings on the author's own life, his experimenting with different drugs, and his understanding of Buddhism - in none of which I have any interest at all.

The parts where Matthiessen describes the natural environment of his trek through Nepal are fascinating. Unfortunately, these are too few and too far between for my enjoyment.

I read 85 pages, then skipped to the end. The only sighting of the snow leopard is literally mentioned in the last 3 pages - and he doesn't go into much detail because he wasn't even there. He simply included a very short letter from George Schaller which briefly stated that he did manage to see one in the end (and after Matthiessen had returned home). 

I get that there may be some beauty in Matthiessen's writing, his musings, and his dealing with grief after the loss of his wife, but all that esoteric babble just isn't for me, especially not when I expected the book to focus more on the expedition and the wildlife.  

Next!

GS is the zoologist George Schaller. I knew him first in 1969, in the Serengeti Plain of East Africa, where he was working on his celebrated study of the lion. When I saw him next, in New York City in the spring of 1972, he had started a survey of wild sheep and goats and their near relatives the goat-antelopes. He wondered if I might like to join him the following year on an expedition to northwest  Nepal, near the frontier of Tibet, to study the bharal, or Himalayan blue sheep; it was his feeling, which he meant to confirm, that this strange "sheep" of remote ranges was actually less sheep than goat, and perhaps quite close to the archetypal ancestor of both.

Page 1 of the main text of this book has been a roller-coaster of events already: starting with exclamations of "Shut up!" at the surprise that there is such a fabulous creature as a "blue sheep" and resulting in the utter disappointment on finding out that the blue sheep are, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"Blue sheep. Blue sheep (genus Pseudois), also called bharal, either of two species of sheeplike mammals, family Bovidae (order Artiodactyla), that inhabit upland slopes in a wide range throughout China, from Inner Mongolia to the Himalayas. Despite their name, blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur) are neither blue nor sheep."

Ugh. I am gutted.

They are kinda cute, tho.

[Photo Source]

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterrupted experience in which body, mind, and nature and the same.” (42)

                Matthiessen’s book is part travelogue, part naturalist observations, and part coming to terms with loss.  About a year after the death of his wife, Matthiessen travels along with a friend in search of a snow leopard, really in the search of big blue sheep.  It’s much hiking and camping, and eating. 

                Early in the book, I found myself wondering why or to be more exact what type of father would leave a young son just a year after the son lost his mother.  Matthiessen himself seems to be aware of this reaction, and he does not try to beg excuses.  Instead, he quotes his son’s letter, a sobering missive. 

                And yet, this is not a self-indulgent pity party book.

                It’s a book about coming to terms with one’s self, with loss, with life.  Or what “Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found more divine than yourself” (63)

                The point is that Matthiessen is able to make this a book about enlightenment, both his and the readers, so much so that one des agree with GS who wonders if it would perhaps be better if the snow leopard remained unseen.

                At times, the reader does wonder.  For instance, if PM had been a mother, would the book have garnered as much support and positive reviews.  Is my reaction about his leaving his son because I don’t, I can’t, understand PM’s own grieving process?  What is normal grieving anyway?

                In many, it is the confessional tone, the prompting of these questions as well as the wonderful nature writing make the book worth a read.

I was turned on to the 15th century poet an Zen master Ikkyū by the writer Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard and a practitioner of Zen himself. When he died in 2014 the Paris Review (which he helped found) printed an Ikkyū quote from one of his books with his obituary. I was struck by the quote and have incorporated it into my own life:

"Having no destination, I am never lost"

I used it recently in my employee profile at a new job and decided to look further into the original poet. I took out the only book they have at the Free Library and on the first page came across this couplet:

"if there's nowhere to rest at the end

how can I get lost on the way?"

It is terribly obvious that translations will differ, and this is hardly the most striking example but it stuck with me all week and now I have to learn Japanese so I can understand the original. It will go on the queue with Italian, French, Russian, Spanish, and ancient Greek and Roman. I must know!

What is one to make of the book-as-artifact?

Since it is usually discussed regarding the superiority/eventual triumph of eBooks, I try to keep to practical considerations and try to avoid getting too sentimental about the book as an object, but the truth is I love books almost as much as I love reading. When I worked at a used book shop I enjoyed flipping through the volumes and finding boarding passes, pictures, postcards, and ephemera from any number of locations and events.

I write my names in the back of all my books and I enjoy the thought of the book telling a story. There is the copy of The Snow Leopard I was given by an ex-girlfriend who was not nearly as impressed as I was, a paperback Vampires in The Lemon Grove that I leant to a friend before I finished it and now resides somewhere in her apartment, or the copy of NW that had come damaged and that I appropriated even with the front cover torn off. Though I joke around about people disrespecting books, I love to find old dog ears and underlined passages—it is really best if you keep this to your own books and spare those of the school or library.

I was recently enjoying a day free of commitment and went for a stroll through Center City. I headed toward a place I had heard of during the Bloomsday celebrations. The Rosenbach Museum and Library, a modest place tucked among the row houses near Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, is the home to Joyce’s manuscript for Ulysses as well as a first edition copy. That is what brought me. They had an exhibit held over from Bloomsday about the Shakespearean influences on Joyce. That is the kind of thing I go for. Now you know why I have a blog on books.

The Rosenbach isn’t very large, there are three exhibit rooms, but their collection definitely makes it a cool stop. They have Maurice Sendak’s papers as well as a mural he painted in a friend’s home in one exhibit and the delightfully morbid collection of early American children’s books in another. The tours are the most interesting thing though. The free tours take you through the brothers’ house, not particularly compelling but certainly nice, then you get to the Library. Here are Joyce’s manuscript pages on display, here are Joseph Conrad’s papers, a first English edition of Don Quixote, John Ruskin, letters of Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas’s manuscript for Under Milk Wood, and more. There are some 400,000 volumes in all.

Marianne Moore’s papers are there too, also her living room. The whole room. Recreated and arranged just as it was in her East Village Apartment.

I went on a second tour. The hands-on tour gets you access to some of these materials in a guided presentation by the librarian. I hopped on to the hands-on tour of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The librarian talks about interesting features about the story behind the story. Bram Stoker’s terrible handwriting for instance, little drawings, reading notes from his research—mercifully typed.

There is something particularly appealing to writers in this experience. It brings things closer to life. Even biographies and apocryphal stories have plots, they are selling you a story, but the notes, the manuscripts, they are just chaotic enough to be real. Stoker was as methodical as anyone in his research, but then there are notes with a shaky outline of a castle, a phrase or two, something about a character that never makes the story, something about three characters that kind of merge into one in the final draft.

I think there is still something to be taken by passing a day considering art and books. It has an effect on us that is more than just clicking through images, it is a communal experience. The small museums especially are great for talking with intelligent, interested people. It was a day outside of the apartment, outside of myself.