Introspection: The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

During a Zen-flavored Himalayan trek, Peter Matthiessen confronted the elusive nature of the self and existence. Our January 2024 Introvert Book Club selection brings us a paradox of introspection.

Many reviewers of the 1978 spiritual memoir and travel narrative The Snow Leopard describe the premise of the book as explorer, Zen Buddhist and writer Peter Matthiessen embarking on a months-long Himalayan trek in search of the snow leopard, a solitary animal native to the area.  This is inaccurate.  In introducing the journey, Matthiessen said that field biologist and mountaineer George Schaller invited him to come along on a climb into remote mountains of Nepal where Schaller would study bharal, Himalayan blue sheep, during their mating season.  They might also glimpse a snow leopard, known to blend into the high mountains so well hardly anyone ever sees one in the wild.  

Tracking down the snow leopard was not Matthiessen’s purpose for the trip.  Indeed, a scientist in Nepal who was investigating perhaps-mythical, perhaps-real yetis asked him straight out what brought him to the Himalayas:

“He could understand why GS, as a biologist, would walk hundreds of miles over high mountains to collect wildlife data on the Tibetan Plateau.  But why was I going?  What did I hope to find?

“I shrugged, uncomfortable.  To say I was interested in blue sheep, or snow leopards, or 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 could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?”