Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessenwas an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. He was also a prominent environmental activist. Matthiessen's nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopardand American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. His fiction was...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 May 1927
CountryUnited States of America
Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.
Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?
Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks.
You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.
In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.