Books Comment Crossword Dance Dept. of Returns Fiction Growing Pains Letter from Minneapolis Musical Events On Television Personal History Poems Postpartum Dept. Record Keeper Sketchbook Tables for Two The Art World The Pictures The Theatre 好物推荐 Books What Do We Hope to Find When We Look for a Snow Leopard? The Strange Case of Ivor Gurney Briefly Noted What Makes a Cult a Cult? 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. By Kathryn Schulz July 5, 2021 Biologically speaking, the sperm whale belongs to the genus Physeter, to the family Physeteridae, and to that magnificent group of aquatic mammals properly called Cetacea. As a literary matter, however, it belongs, indisputably, to Herman Melville. Certain other authors of both fiction and nonfiction have achieved a feat like his, forging an alternative taxonomy whereby they become permanently associated with a particular creature. Thus 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. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was a man of many other associations as well: novelist, travel writer, environmentalist, co-founder of The Paris Review, Zen Buddhist, undercover agent for the C.I.A. But he sealed his connection to one of nature’s most elusive animals in 1978, with the publication of “The Snow Leopard,” which first appeared in part in this magazine and went on to win two National Book Awards, one for the now defunct category of contemporary thought, one for general nonfiction. Despite the book’s title, the snow leopard is almost entirely absent from its pages, faint and fleeting as a pawprint in the snow. Matthiessen dedicates roughly as many paragraphs to it as to the yeti, and of those two mysterious alpine animals he thinks he catches a glimpse of only the imaginary one. And yet “The Snow Leopard” manages to convey the impression of being subtly yet fundamentally about its stated subject matter, albeit in some chimeric way—part literal, part figurative, like a creature turning midway through into a thought. Even scholars writing about snow leopards routinely cite Matthiessen’s book, while general-interest authors, perhaps recognizing that a flag had been planted in particularly high and difficult terrain, have mostly looked elsewhere for their stories. But now comes the Parisian writer Sylvain Tesson with “The Art of Patience,” its title a necessary accommodation to an apparently unwelcome predecessor: in French, the language in which it was written, Tesson’s book, like Matthiessen’s, is simply named for the animal. “The Art of Patience,” which was ably translated by Frank Wynne, is not an homage to its precursor, to put it mildly. One understands why Tesson wants to put some distance between himself and Matthiessen, whose book looms over much of nature writing, enormous and immovable as Annapurna. Yet this new book echoes the earlier one in countless ways. Like Matthiessen, Tesson is facing the far side of his forties, feeling his age and his physical limitations. Like Matthiessen, he hopes his journey will help him settle into a new way of being—Zen, in the original book; the more secular “art of patience” in this one. Like Matthiessen, he is a kind of Watson figure, sidekick throughout his adventure to a savvier character: in his case, Vincent Munier, a French wildlife photographer; for Matthiessen, George Schaller, one of the world’s preëminent field biologists. Finally, Tesson’s interest in the snow leopard, like Matthiessen’s, is tangled up, in troubling ways, with grief and women. Even where these books diverge, the effect is less to set this new one apart than to create a study in contrasts. Within the field of nature writing, Matthiessen works primarily in the tradition of the spiritual pilgrim, while Tesson writes in the tradition of the disgruntled misanthrope. Together, they raise that age-old question of how we are supposed to relate to nature. But they also suggest a more recent problem: as the wilderness grows ever more endangered and impoverished, in what ways, and to what ends, are we supposed to write about it? It’s easy to understand the appeal of the snow leopard. For one thing, even in photographs it is magnificent to behold: pale green of eye, pale gray of fur, dappled with dark rosettes like the risen ghost of a jaguar. Its muzzle is huge, its paws enormous, its tail XXXXL, equally useful for maintaining balance in steep terrain and wrapping around its body like a blanket to ward off the cold while napping—which it can well afford to do, since it is an unusually literal apex predator, unchallenged suzerain of the roof of the world, regnant since three million B.C. Its realm encompasses some of the most storied and least accessible terrain on earth, from the Hindu Kush to the Himalaya, from Siberia to Mongolia to Bhutan. For a certain type of person (and I am one of them), this combination of big cats and high mountains is thrilling, the animal and its context conspiring to suggest a kind of extreme, untouchable wildness. Further contributing to this mystique is the matter of scarcity: of all big cats, the snow leopard is one of the rarest. Perhaps four thousand adults remain, or perhaps two thousand; at all events, they are fiendishly difficult to spot. Photographs of tigers date back to at least 1891, but the earliest known photo of a snow leopard was taken in 1970, by George Schaller, Peter Matthiessen’s travelling companion—at the time, one of only two Westerners to have laid eyes on the creature in the wild. Drawings of snow leopards, however, are ancient and appear all across the heraldic iconography of Central Asia, from the coat of arms of the Tatars to the official seal of the city of Samarqand. In some of these images, the beast is rendered with wings, which seems apt, considering that snow leopards routinely reach heights far above those customary for eagles and falcons. All of this—the remoteness, the rarity, the altitude, the furtiveness—presents a problem for anyone hoping to encounter a snow leopard. That’s the kind of challenge that Matthiessen was not wired to resist. By the time he set off in search of the creature, he had already travelled extensively, to New Guinea, the Serengeti, the Bering Sea, Patagonia. And so, when Schaller invited him to tag along on a trip to a region of Nepal known as Inner Dolpo, deep within the Himalaya, in order to study the bharal sheep and possibly glimpse a snow leopard, Matthiessen jumped at the chance. The resulting book takes the form of a journal, beginning on September 28, 1973, and ending on December 1st—a dicey time of year to trek the local mountains, dictated not by comfort or safety but by the mating season of the sheep. Together with Schaller and a group of Sherpas and porters, Matthiessen travels on foot some two hundred and fifty miles, and his book, accordingly, proceeds at the literary equivalent of a walking pace. That’s the right speed for registering one’s surroundings, which is Matthiessen’s forte; he is a wonderful observer, convincing without being showy, and at its best his prose has the documentary force of early film footage. He takes note of a hawk on a cliff, how “it hunches while the sun goes down, nape feathers lifting in the wind”; he watches on a cloudy day as “a pine forest drifts by in breaths of mist.” Some of his most striking revelations are the smallest ones. Pausing to admire a lizard basking on a rock fifteen thousand feet in the air in mid-November, he writes that, “for the first time in my life, I apprehended the pure heat of our star”—how searingly hot the sun must burn for its light to pass through ninety-three million miles of bitter cold yet still suffice to warm the two creatures sharing that mountainside. But Matthiessen is after deeper insights than that on his journey. One night, he meets a biologist who asks him why he is traversing such inhospitable terrain if he has no work to do in the region. “I shrugged, uncomfortable,” Matthiessen writes: Cartoon by Roz Chast To say I was interested in blue sheep or snow leopards, or even in remote lamaseries, was no answer to his question, though all of that was true; to say I was making a pilgrimage seemed fatuous and vague, though in some sense that was true as well. And so I admitted that I did not know. How would I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown . ? Even the vast Himalaya are, in this case, a stand-in for something larger. By “penetrate the secrets of the mountains,” Matthiessen means that he hopes to grasp the true nature of existence. As a student of Zen Buddhism, he believes the self to be an obstacle to that understanding—invasive, distracting, always obscuring more significant things, as the lowest of hills, when viewed up close, can block even Mt. Everest from view. Having previously tried and failed to get out of his own way via LSD, ayahuasca, mescaline, and psilocybin, he turns to Zen and to the mountains, hoping to lose himself enough to perceive the world more clearly.