The Snow Leopard

Someone very important to me recently gave this to me as a Christmas gift. I'm only part way in, but I can see why this book has made such a striking and radical impression on all those who read it. The Snow Leopard chronicles the physical and spiritual travels of Peter Matthiessen and George Schaller through the Himalayas. This book will change all who experience it. The following excerpt this morning on the subway gave me chills and I re-read it several times before moving forward:

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 are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the ear and air and water from which we came.

Compare the wild, free painting of the child with the stiff, pinched "pictures" these become as the painter notices the painting and tries to portray "reality" as others see it; self-conscious now, he steps out of his own painting and, finding himself apart from things, notices the silence all around and becomes alarmed by the vast significations of Creation. The armor of the "I" begins to form, the construction and desperate assertion of separate identity, the loneliness: "Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern."