By Lance Richardson<\/p>\n The central project of Matthiessen\u2019s existence was a relentless, often painful attempt to locate what, quoting Zen Buddhists, he called a \u201ctrue nature\u201d\u2014an authentic core beneath the layers of identity that he had received or constructed. His life story provides a warning for today\u2019s perpetually dissatisfied strivers: mainly members of the tech or business elite who have made a name for themselves, only to still feel empty and insecure. Many use their considerable resources to set out for other territories in search of something they\u2019re unlikely to find.<\/p>\n Read: You don\u2019t know yourself as well as you think you do<\/a><\/p>\n Like many pilgrimages, Matthiessen\u2019s journey began with a foundational trauma. Born in 1927, he had a storybook childhood on New York\u2019s Fishers Island that was ruptured one summer by an incident on his father\u2019s boat. The young Matthiessen had been learning to swim, so his father took him out to the harbor and threw him overboard to see if the lessons had stuck. As Richardson writes, Matthiessen made the mistake of clinging to his father\u2019s shirt as he was thrown and nearly broke his arm on the side of the boat. He would later call this humiliation \u201cthe opening skirmish in an absolutely pointless lifelong war\u201d with his family, and his adulthood was a series of escapes from that original wound. He fled to Paris, the classic expatriate move, but did so under bizarre circumstances\u2014co-founding The Paris Review while serving as an agent for the CIA. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to flee a society he saw as corrupt; Matthiessen, for his part, went to the center of the establishment\u2019s undercover operations to fund and facilitate his own existential escape.<\/p>\n The only writer to ever win National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Matthiessen was an architect of the postwar intellectual world, a contemporary of giants such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Styron. His peers often waged their philosophical battles in the public squares of New York and Washington, but Matthiessen grew wary of the ego and performance required of the literary lion. Instead he traveled to the mountains of Nepal in search of snow leopards, and deep into China and Mongolia to catch a glimpse of the rarest cranes on Earth. But what he was really searching for was far more personal.<\/p>\n Matthiessen\u2019s pursuits weren\u2019t solely internal; his work was also a very public counterpoint to the materialism and social conformity that he believed defined the second half of 20th-century America. His seminal book, Wildlife in America, published in 1959, was a meticulously researched history of the natural world and the devastating effects of human activity. Richardson rightly calls it \u201ca landmark in nature writing,\u201d which predated Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring<\/a>. Matthiessen\u2019s search for a preindustrial Eden also drives The Snow Leopard<\/a>, his best-known work. On its surface, the book is the account of his two-month trek into Nepal\u2019s Himalayas with the naturalist George Schaller, in 1973. But it is also a record of what Matthiessen called \u201ca true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart\u201d as he grieved the recent death of his wife. The hunt for the elusive, almost mythical snow leopard becomes a metaphor for the search for spiritual enlightenment, a release from the travails and humiliations of everyday human life.<\/p>\n I first read The Snow Leopard when I was 20. It filled me with the misguided but tantalizing belief that a life of meaning was to be found elsewhere. It inspired my own pilgrimage to the Alps, retracing the trails that Friedrich Nietzsche hiked while writing his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/a>; I sought the kind of authenticity that seemed impossible to find in a comfortable American suburb. The journey was enabled by a scholarship to a good school\u2014a form of privilege that was almost entirely lost on me. Matthiessen\u2019s profound and lonely meditations at 17,000 feet were, similarly, made possible by National Geographic funding, a name that opened doors, the very worldly security he was trying to transcend.<\/p>\n Perhaps he understood, on some level, the irony. Richardson writes that in the Amazon, many years before his subject traveled to Nepal, Matthiessen had encountered a genuine wanderer, a French Canadian drifter named Johnny Gauvin, and felt a sudden, uncomfortable self-awareness. Displacement and its attendant poverty were Gauvin\u2019s way of life. Matthiessen realized that he was no authentic man of the wilderness, but an affluent visitor. \u201cIt\u2019s a disturbing quality, and one that induces a certain self-consciousness about one\u2019s eyeglasses, say, or the gleam of one\u2019s new khaki pants,\u201d he wrote in The New Yorker in 1961. Pilgrimages sometimes cause collateral damage too. In later life, he admitted that it may have been a mistake to leave his 8-year-old son so soon after the death of his wife to embark on the Himalayan expedition.<\/p>\n Matthiessen\u2019s example provides a powerful archetype for the modern day. The tech billionaire who flies to space seeking the \u201coverview effect\u201d<\/a> is in search of something beyond the ken of the material world, which he has already conquered. The annual ritual of Burning Man sees wealthy people enact a temporary shedding of their consumerist skin, even if getting there requires enlarging one\u2019s carbon footprint. The Silicon Valley executive who flies to Peru for an ayahuasca retreat is on a journey Matthiessen would have recognized intimately. Long before embarking on his formal Zen training, Matthiessen was an early psychonaut, experimenting with LSD in the 1960s. In search of mind-altering effects, he sought a chemical shortcut to the dissolution of the ego, a forced glimpse of the \u201ctrue nature\u201d that his privilege and ambition otherwise obscured. Matthiessen\u2019s path from psychedelics to the rigorous discipline of Zen meditation shows what a genuine spiritual journey looks like: It is extremely difficult, deeply private, and never-ending. There is no shortcut.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1760466735_940_original.jpg\")
<\/a>True Nature – The Pilgrimage Of Peter Matthiessen<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1760466736_934_original.jpg\")
Jill Krementz<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1760466737_36_original.jpg\")
Jill Krementz<\/p>\n