My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard bears the marks of a well-used life, much like the photo of him in today’s New York Times. The cover is torn and tattered, the linen boards worn and faded, the pages yellowing at the edges. The end pages are full of scribbled notes to myself, the text scored and marked in the margins. This is a much-read book.

I’ve placed it high on the reading list of every writing course I’ve ever taught, tracing the intertwining of its parallel journeys: on the one hand, into the hidden inner sanctum of Dolpo on the Tibetan plateau, in search of the elusive snow leopard; on the other, into the mystical and equally elusive peacefulness of Zen Buddhism.

There were far more than two hands, of course, which is why I read the book so many times and never tired of it, entranced by the intense lyricism of its descriptions of landscape, and the sharp contrast with the pared-down writing about Zen practice.

I have most of Matthiessen’s other books too, both fiction and nonfiction, but this is the one I keep coming back to (in a way I suspect would have deeply disappointed him — no writer cares to be defined by one book above all the others).

I didn’t know much ‘about’ him other than what he revealed in his writing, which was carefully calibrated. I had no idea he worked a naively youthful two years for the CIA, for example, using the Paris Review as a cover, though I did know he’d become a Zen priest, that he was fiercely involved with environmental issues, and that he was… well, not exactly good-husband material. No matter: the writer was more important to me than the man.

Yet much as I love and admire his writing, I haven’t ordered my own copy of his last book, a novel called In Paradise. Instead, it’s waiting for me at the library as I write.  And has been waiting a few days. I delay picking it up because even though it’s Matthiessen, something in me doesn’t want to read it. It’s set at a meditation retreat at the concentration camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz, and the very idea of such a retreat seems, at least to me, a horribly ironic oxymoron. Which may indeed turn out to be his point. I’ll find out soon enough.

Matthiessen died yesterday, at age 86. “I don’t want to cling too hard to life,” he’d said, and by not doing so, I suspect he arrived again at the place he described in this quote from The Tree Where Man Was Born, which serves as the ending of the extraordinarily timed piece on him in today’s NYT magazine. Here it is:

“Lying back against these ancient rocks of Africa, I am content. The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without having discovered what it was.”

What is this if not pure Zen?

My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is as tattered as a book can be and still hold together enough to be called a book.   It is the record of a kind of Zen pilgrimage into one of the most remote parts of the Himalayas, undertaken for many reasons, but among them, the hope of glimpsing the rarest of big cats.

I’ve read the book I don’t know how many times, used it when teaching writing (reading and writing being inseparable activities in my mind), and been carried away each time by the way the writing echoes the landscape — the crystalline purity of the air;  the heady sense of transcendence;  the ruthless clarity of perspective on life “down below”;  the sound of silence at altitude.   If you have ever been alone early morning in high mountains and heard the silence ringing, you will know this is no metaphor:  it does, it rings, as though the whole world were vibrating with the energy of its own existence.

Matthiessen never sees the snow leopard, and the last line of his book — “Have you seen the snow leopard?”  “No.” — is one I treasure.  The idea of the snow leopard as simply not seeable works for me in a suitably Zen kind of way:  the more you search for something elusive, the less likely you are to find it.  The snow leopard will reveal itself if and when it pleases.

But I have just checked back in the book itself,  and that is not the last line.  And though my copy is well marked, as all my favorite books, I can’t find the line, and now am not sure it’s even there.

Yet last night I saw a snow leopard.   More than  one.  Several.

Sometimes the most magical things happen in the most mundane way.    I had somehow ‘paused’ my printer and couldn’t figure out how to unpause it.  A paused printer is no great deal, but still, it was annoying me,  so rather than sit in my study and be annoyed, I closed everything up, began making dinner,  and idly turned on the TV, which was set to Mute.  The public-television station came up, and on it, a ‘Nature’ program.  Yawn.  I went on slicing things, then glanced up at the screen and saw a very large feline nosing up to a remote camera, nuzzling and pawing at it, breathing on the lens.   A spotted feline.   With snow underfoot, and stark, craggy mountains all around.  And I stood very still, as though the feline and I were in the same space, and thought “Nah, that can’t be a snow leopard — you never get to see snow leopards.”

I unmuted the TV, dropped the knife, and kind of glided toward the floor in front of the set.  A totally obsessed film crew had apparently spent months on end at 15,000 feet in the Himalayas trying to track the creatures,   They’d laid remote cameras at multiple points along intersecting ravines and had reached the Matthiessen point of zero expectation.  Which was, of course, when the snow leopards appeared.  And very calmly, without big hoo-has, without chest-pounding or yee-ha-ing or ain’t-we-great or anything like that, the crew quietly and, well, reverently recorded them.

I watched open-mouthed, hardly daring to breathe, as a male sprayed his territory.  As a female found the ‘spraying stone’ and rubbed herself against it.  As the male returned and scented the female.  And then, this time on a manned camera and live film, as the female climbed up a high ridge to make her mating call;  as her howls echoed down through the ravines, calling the male to her;  as he slunk up the ridge toward her;  as they nuzzled and rubbed against each other with a kind of ineffable gentleness;  and then, as they finally mated — exactly as one dreams snow leopards should mate, silhouetted against the high blue sky.

I sat completely rapt until the program ended, and then became aware of the big goofy grin on my face.  A beatific grin.  And on the floor beside me, my tabby-Persian cross, a miniature version of the big cats, similarly colored but with stripes instead of spots, may have been grinning too.  She’d sat up and pricked her ears, eyes eager and muscles tensed as the female leopard began her mating call, then paced back and forth before the television set, all excited, it seemed, by the idea of  attracting her own huge slink of a leopard.

I checked on the PBS site this morning, and found that the film is called ‘Silent Roar’ — I don’t know why, since I missed the first half  — but you can read about it here, and scroll down on this Snow Leopard Conservancy page to find some video, including a short clip of the two leopards mating.

There is a coda.  This morning my friend and IT guru Olivier reset my computer, which is when I remembered that the system I am now using, Mac OS X, is called Snow Leopard.   I swore I would never ever sound like a Mac convert, but whether you call this coincidence or synchronicity (or most likely, simply the mind making connections where it would have made none before), it feels like confirmation of my decision to switch from my old PC.

So yes, I saw the snow leopard.  But no, I didn’t really.  The leopard was on TV, and I was in my houseboat in Seattle, and that is why I stay with that line that may or may not be in Peter Matthiessen’s magnificent  book — and why this is my favorite photo of the snow leopard:  just the shadow, and the snow, and the mountains, and the sky.