 Welcome to this panel on the snow leopard, or as Mary Lide calls it, the no leopard. We're going to each make some comments and talk about some different things and maybe open it up for a little Q&A at the end. So I guess Peter is going to start us off. I don't have any prepared remarks to say about this, so I'll pass it back to you. No, but except anecdotal thoughts, I read the snow leopard more than 20 years ago when I was trying to write my own first book and I took his structure for my book. My book was a memoir and so I liked what he did. He has a present tense narrative around which he wove memories of what happened with his wife, of his wife dying, some of his other life, and also his preoccupation with Zen Buddhism. And that worked for me and I've always said to people, I was reading a bunch of travel books at the time and so I've always said to people, it helps if you have a model to work with, if you have an idea of a novel or particularly a memoir, what is it that you've read that you think, I thought I could do the snow leopard, but I see how that works and you're going to talk about structure, but that worked for me. And it gave me in the flailing around of the beginning of the writing, of writing what I hope would be a book, that sort of showed me a path of how to do it. So I read it then and I loved the book. I was struck by what we're all struck by, which is Matheson's writing and then of course his Buddhism and his, I mean it's a travel book and it's a spiritual book and then it's a very personal writer's book. It's very much a writer's book and I want to say Matheson's quite disingenuous in it. He says things like, why am I here? We know why George Shower's here and we know why the Sherpas are here, but why am I here? And I'm absolutely convinced that the reason Matheson was there was he knew and as this film says, he knew he could get a really good book out of it. I think he was so as lost or as uncertain of his motives as he claims. He's clearly a very ambitious man and he had then, you know, he made his mark in a number of areas of writing and he was clearly on the lookout as a professional as an ambitious writer is for something to what's his next big thing going to be. And as he says, you know, if he can't make something out of this and he did, he made an incredibly wonderful book out of it all. I've studied Buddhism too, as many of us have, but I've never read such a cogent, distilled, elegant description of what Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism is as he does. So he's magnificent in cutting to the essence of a thing and getting beyond the, I mean, a lot of Buddhism is full of, you know, platitudinal writing and metaphorical stuff. And Matheson makes it, I've got all these things like page number and I can't really go back to that. But his explications of Zen are terrific, very distilled, very simple, very clear. And so in this film when somebody said, you know, many people have come to Buddhism, through Zen Buddhism, particularly through Peter Matheson, I could see why. Because it's, I've read these other books and they're great, but they're different. They're not necessarily by writers. They're by noted Buddhists or thinkers and stuff. And Matheson is first and foremost a writer. I thought that this was, I thought that the actual going to the, for Matheson to see a snow leopard. And then, I mean, obviously for George Schaller, the reason to go was to see these sheep jumping around in the Himalayas. And Matheson says, as I say, disingenuously, he wanted to see the snow leopard. But I think it's a really a very romantic book, a really, really romantic book. It positions the narrator, the author. So in this, it's kind of very much a confection. And I think we should realize that. It's a, it didn't just sort of fall out of his trip. I'm sure he went with a, with a big check from Sean from the New Yorker. And he really knew he could get a book out. And he wrote this incredibly romantic book of a writer going off to the ends of the earth. And no one was as prepared as a writer to see what was there as Matheson was. And it reminded me of the razor's edge. William Somerset Mom's The Razor's Edge, which has as its epigraph. The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over. Thus, the wise say, the path to salvation is hard taken from the Upanishads. And I think he went about it just as in a very calculated way. And to write and deliver a really romantic book, you know, in its excitement and stuff. The thing that I know, 20 years ago when I read it, I really was knocked out by it. And I thought, here's a wonderful book. And it is. And I still think so. I was struck this time though by the writing. And the writing seems to me it's very much a performance. And by that I mean it's like, if you see a really great piece of acting by Lawrence Olivier. Some actors, the actor disappears and you just see the character. But if you see Lawrence Olivier, you see the actor. He's sort of, he's doing a fantastic job. And you're thinking, wow, what a fantastic piece of acting. But you don't actually necessarily, you do see the character. And I was struck time and time and time and time again in this book by a kind of, not quite purple prose, but a very self-conscious writerly prose, which is his job. So I mean, I'm not attacking him, but I haven't remembered that before. And I think he's really, he's masterful and he assembles his stuff. And it did come out of his journal, but he then, you know, he went back to Long Island and he assembled this book out of his journals. And he assembled a very beautifully written book, but it's still very beautifully written. There's nothing wrong with that. But I mean, the egrets, the white egrets flying across a stormy sky. And it's very painterly and really excellent in that way. And the marriage, the juxtaposition of things like that with the spiritual or the, you know, the complimenting of things with the spiritual are really wonderful. But I was, I just was struck again by, wow, what a really terrific exercise this masterful, ambitious professional writer has made out of this. As opposed to say perhaps, I haven't actually read Cheryl Strait's Wild. But I think that is a book that has, you know, it's in this contemporary well-regarded book. I think that came out of the experience first and then the book was assembled afterward through a thing. I just, I make this point just because I think, you know, I think it's really good to bear in mind as writers that you need ambition and you need to approach things in a very, it helps to approach things sometimes in a very premeditated way. And not to forget that these really great writers and these really great books are actually, there are things that are fabricated, they're Faberge eggs or whatever made by masters and that that's what this is. Matheson's prose here is very stately, I found. I loved words like, he uses words like improvident, which I love the word improvident. But I felt there was a stately kind of, you know, really he sort of wound himself up to a platform of some kind of stately, authorial deliverance of a performance. And so I'll let it go at that. Those were some of my initial thoughts reading this book again 20 years later. I remain in incredible adoration for it and it rings true. Thank you. I thought I would talk a little bit about the book's structure and because I talk a lot about memoir and essays with nonfiction students and I'm sitting next to someone who actually wrote a memoir and essays. That would be you. I want to kind of think about this book as a memoir and essays, that if you took each passage that's in here, it would be a mini essay. And Baron and I were talking earlier about what you can do with a thousand words and probably if you took each chapter, it would boil down to a thousand to fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand words. And that if you string them together, it makes this beautiful necklace that he's made. And that achieves the goal of memoir, of remembering an event and in particular this event of looking for something that isn't found. But also the book belongs to a larger tradition of journey narrative, for lack of a better word. To which of course someone like something like Wilde by Cheryl Strait fits in to a certain extent. But I'm thinking of way back like Basho's The Narrow Road to the North as a journey narrative. So to place it into a context that's a little bit richer than Cheryl Strait and to say that Peter Matheson becomes then to a tradition that's much longer, older and rich and also multicultural for that matter. There is this excursive structure that is part of this book that almost demands present tense, I think. And the use of present tense is kind of an interesting element because I've heard some fiction writers rail against the new tendency in fiction to write in present tense. Yet for me in a narrative like this, present tense seems to be the only tense to use to import a kind of immediacy to the event that it's actually describing. And kind of piggybacking off of what Peter said about Matheson's lostness. I think that's part of his, it's a narratorial device and it's really an artifice. It's part of his persona. We tend to think that it's Peter Matheson writing this book but it's actually Peter Matheson creating a narrator who also adopts a persona to tell this story. And the persona is one of this man, well the narrator is a man whose wife has died, whose son he's left behind, who has an interest in nature. But the persona is this seeker and he's a confused lost seeker. So I don't know if you can see the difference between those two elements but I like to talk a lot about persona and narrator. And for me the difference is that the narrator, it's all nouns. He's a father, he's a husband, he's a widower. But the persona is something different. He's lost, he's seeking, he's doing all these other things that are very active. So with that there's also a great use of character. Other characters, the scaffolding characters in this story. There's the other protagonist of George Schaller who balances Matheson's like kind of lost Zen Buddhist, you know, miraculous in nature character with this taciturn, and when you see him in the film you think, wow is that the guy that Matheson was describing? Because he seems so nice and human and warm and he doesn't seem at all like this man that Matheson has described. And I would imagine that if we met Tuckton and Guy Alston and Jung Po, if we met all of those characters we'd see something very different in them too. But what happens in particular with Tuckton is very interesting because he's planted as a device so that we keep coming back to him. He's like an echo that keeps resounding. And in fact the word ringing keeps resounding in this book too. So we keep coming back to him as this point that we can land on and he grounds the other characters because he suggests there's some mystery about him that's there and we're also very invested, I think at least I was, in what is going to become of this character especially when they haven't shown up for so long. So he really milks that suspense of them not showing up. It's one of those little narrative threads that goes through the whole book even to the end where he can't find him, right? So it makes sense. He sets out to see the snow leopard and doesn't see it and then at the end tries to find Tuckton and doesn't find him either. So I think that's kind of the fate of these characters propels us forward if only to learn what becomes of them. So one of the things I like to harp on with people is what are the pivotal moments in a narrative and what are the pivotal moments in the life of a narrator and how does that help us define narrative and story? And I was struck by this one passage and I won't go on much longer but when we say that you need to write to discovery, especially in a nonfiction narrative what that means is letting yourself go and that's the other great wisdom in this book of course is letting go of your preconceived notions of things but letting yourself go long enough so that you discover what Frost famously called what you didn't know you knew, right? So if you can't get to that discovery moment, maybe you failed and maybe failure is a good thing and a teaching device and I hope it is because I think failure should be instructive but on page, it starts on actually page 242 It's the November 15th section and he's looking around and then he realizes that he's hoarding his last chocolate for the journey back across the mountains and I love this line, forever getting ready for life instead of living it each day and then he says later that the beauty of this place must be cheerfully abandoned like the wild rocks and the bright water of its streams frustration at the paltryness of words drives me to write this is a little bit of what Peter was saying but there's more of Shea and a single she-pair in one withered sprig of everlasting than in all these notes and in the margin I wrote but is it? Like I don't think and then he says to strive for permanence and what I think I have perceived is to miss the point and then he keeps going and it's very clear that this is one of those pivotal moments where he's realizing really why he was there and it comes kind of late in the book but it's his way of thinking that shifts so he lets go of the leopard and seeing the leopard and of any kind of permanence or at least he does on the page and it's a really nice moment of discovery you know you kind of it's always wonderful when you think you can't make this shit up right so the impending snow the idea of impending snow is the idea of impending doom and that creates this other narrative tension so that I don't know about all of you but I was sitting here thinking they better get out of there soon he better go home like what about Alex who's waiting for him but that's all a device to drive you forward in the story you can't forget that that serves artifice so it was very interesting some of the things in the film that line he said my characters don't step off the page they step out of landscapes and he also writes in here he quotes shallower twice he repeats this maybe it's better that there are some things we don't see and I would add to that that I remember someone saying to me once maybe there are some things that are better left unfinished especially in writing so when Peter says this is a writerly book I think some of those there are things we're not seeing in the creation of this text as well and then there was a person speaking about Mathudson's use of environment as character and I kind of thought that that was an interesting point that we could all think about when we're writing that place can function as character very much if you think of Marilyn Robinson's book Housekeeping Fingerbone Idaho is very much a character in that place and then I guess the last thing I wanted to say is that this is just a general comment it didn't occur to me until I watched that film that his book Wildlife in America came out in 1959 which is the year I was born and so I had this terrible thought that in my own lifetime the destruction of the environment has been so rampant and then I see it exponentially increasing so that people who are another generation in this room can say the same thing that in your own lifetime so we've been talking a lot about Annie Dillard in our workshop and her charge to people that you should dedicate your life to something if you're going to be a writer you should also dedicate yourself to some cause of some sort and I guess I feel like it is perfect that we were watching this film and reading this author and how I'll wrap up is by saying that it made me very sad to think that in my lifetime somebody like Mathudson came out with this book and then Bill McKibbin you know what 30 years later something or less than 30 years later came out with The End of Nature and then recently I was at the Bronx Zoo and saw two snow leopards there and those snow leopards have a better chance of surviving at the zoo than they do in the wild and so if there's ever a time to be a writer with a cause in the world I mean there have been causes for centuries and millennia and I feel very strongly that now we're in that place where it's not hard to find that cause so since we're just watching a film about an activist and as I said to Baron you know we were talking about Leonard Peltier who is still in prison by the way and very ill you know think about those things that those are things around you that can motivate you in narrative very much and it's really kind of a breath of fresh air to see that activist part of Matheson's personality brought in that film that I think we sometimes miss I'll just stop there I want to say a little bit about what for me are some of the spiritual dimensions of the snow leopard I first came to the snow leopard I read it when it came out so I was living in the woods in Maine off the grid and it was a book that spoke to me enormously and you know to just harken to what Kim just said I think there are many levels of this book and the basic level I think is how the earth lives that seems to me almost the basic level of this book which isn't something to think much about because we take it for granted basically and I agree with Kim I don't think the human race can go on taking that for granted frankly because I don't think there's going to be much of a human race if we do so I think there's this desire in Matheson he saw it in the movie to continually probe that whatever you want to call it question, issue of how does the earth live what's happening basically and the snow leopard is so extraordinary and I'll talk more about this because it's what it's step by step literally people used to be pilgrims on this earth and they walked step by step to wherever they were going and we pretty much lost that we lost a lot of things and that's part of the genius basically of the snow leopard is that just step by step in which he encounters how the earth lives and you feel that in the snow leopard right when you see the birds you see all those rivers and streams you feel the life of the earth the snow that's going to come or won't come you feel how the earth lives you know it's animism the earth is alive and you feel that but then you also feel in the book how people live too there are all these people he keeps encountering and there are all different kinds of people even though to us we might think they're all the same village by village he articulates how the people are different and they have different approaches to living really in ways and yet you also feel the relentlessness he comments on time and time again all the trees are going to be gone the pressures are enormous in terms of the destruction of the environment so that's in there how other people live in the Sherpas in their whole world but then obviously where it really comes home is how do I live you know who am I here amidst all this and I very much agree it's a pilgrimage it's a quest book to try to find something out about that Peter used the word which I think is a beautiful word assemble I think this is all about writing in the sense that we're all assemblers we're always gathering this book is for me one of the great books of gathering basically a lot of people would look at this and come up with something a lot more disparate than Peter Matheson came up with in terms of how he focused this book so because he has that lens of his own life the enormous sense of what loss that informs this book in terms of what he has been through so he's empty in a way and it's not that this necessarily fills him but it comes into him I think he's open in a way because of that enormous loss I mean you see that you look at that picture of his wife it just breaks your heart she died young and then there's you know there's a there's another level I like to say in Emily Dickinson where she goes cosmic and that's how the universe lives basically I think that's part of the snow leopard too absolutely that he goes to this place that's what whatever you want to call it the inexpressible cannot be said what's in the blade of grass however you want to say it and he's not afraid of that place and I really deeply honor this book for that and he alluded to going to Japan with Bernie Glassman don't say Bernard Glassman Bernie Glassman and this is the book Night Head and Dragon River which is about his journey to Japan in the notes he quotes this is what he says in a note having no real vocabulary for what science cannot define we tend to dismiss all unexplainable experiences as quotes supernatural that is impossible and the many who have had them and dare say so are jeeringly condemned by a halo of fatuity or downright foolishness mostly these halos are deserved and yet and yet as Rilke said in his letters to a young poet and this is Rilke that mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm the experiences that are called emotions the whole so-called spirit world death all those things so closely akin to us have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied to say nothing of God and so I think Matheson that place and so the upshot of all these hows is what how to live and that we saw that beautifully I think in the movie that you know one thing I love about them is you know how to say it so profoundly no offense to anyone unprofessorial in the sense that this is about how we live on earth and it's important for every one of us in terms of how we do that literature is not something we just quote study literature is something we live with literature informs our existence so that brings me to the Matheson as the writer and I think Matheson and you see this again in the in the in the in the movie there's how we live which we know quite a bit about that but then it's also how we might live and I think that's a big part of the snow leopard you know just to read the snow leopard is basically to give us some sense of how we might live in terms of obviously just daily encounters with human beings with the natural world our own our own use of language I mean it's all there in terms of how we might live you guys want to jump in well I was to piggyback on what you're saying with what I was saying about his explication of Buddhism and how clear it is but he also you won't see a Buddhist doing this but he has sort of joined rather wonderfully and neatly and availability the world of physics with spirituality by on page 61 he says today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed that things merely change shape or form that matter is insubstantial in origin a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron so what he's saying there is that anything can work any any idea any belief any spiritual basis can fit into can be accommodated by physics because we are all made of stars and star material and nothing no matter has been created and so I mean just a sort of like a reductive example would be people who say well there can be no such thing as reincarnation reincarnation because you know I mean there used to be 50 people and now there are 8 billion so I mean how did we all come back again but you can't because you know all that matter is that all those 8 billion people are not made of new matter they're not new matter they're just reassembled in the form of human form and there's no reason therefore according to what Mathis is saying here which I subscribe to that matter cannot be endlessly reshaped and that's what he's writing about here in the spiritual point part of the book yes I also was very struck the idea of I keep I keep this quote in my head from Ursula K. Le Guin of all people and it's well she has an interesting story we think of her as a science fiction writer but the K in her that middle K in her name is Krober and Theodora Krober was the author of Ishii in Two Worlds which is one of the most tragic books you might ever want to read about one of the last wild Indians in North America who was put on display in a museum by her father who was a linguist so when we say Ursula K. Le Guin just think of her history and where she turned her vision toward but she said true voyages return and I think she's alluding there very much to Joseph Campbell's idea of the hero's journey which is very much this is how this book is structured departure, initiation, return right those are the those are the three elements of this voyage of any journey literature I think that's what it is but what's interesting to me is I kind of bristle at the word journey until I read a book like this and he uses it and I say that's okay he's on a real journey and so maybe the idea of how to live and how to be and how to be a writer and how to live a writerly life is not the journey you're taking with the writing but the actual journey you're taking out in the world to see what the world is and to bring it back and put it on the page and that is the hard part I think and this idea of assembling it you know if we think all those notes just magically turned into a book I don't think so no it was I think genius is the word it was a man who found the perfect marriage between his literary ambition, his abilities and his sensitivity, his spirituality and place what he found he put all those things together probably better in this book than in any other of his wonderful books and sort of found a perfect way to encapsulate them all but what you're saying true is I think what you're saying and I wrote down here the objects of the journey, the sheep, the snow leopards they're MacGuffins and the journey is the whole point of the thing right my favorite line in this book is about, I'm very fascinated by the character of Takten and my favorite line is no I am because he's he's the counterpoint I think and the counterweight to Matheson's brooding sensibility he's the crazy wisdom you know the evil monk but I love this line there are no boundaries to this man he loves us all I mean wow that's a great epitaph like I want that one there are no boundaries she loves us all right it's kind of what I think is a really rewarding sentence to find in a book like this that he's made that discovery too about another human being on the face of the earth who he will never see again and that's the other piece is journeying with people you may never see again you know at least not in that form right yes yes yeah a couple more things I want to say before we turn it to you I think in these elements that he's assembling I think one element that's ideally crucial in writing but it doesn't happen every day very far from it is enchantment I think this is an this book is about enchantment he goes to a place maybe he suspects that's going to happen to him and that's one reason he wants to go there but he goes to this place where enchantment which we God knows what we associate with that word but it's literal in this sense I mean he goes to this landscape that is so much faster than any human being that it puts him in that place in terms of literally he's enchanted and you feel that I think as you read the book that it's something real and that's why I read you that quote about the so-called supernatural he experiences that and it emanates from what it emanates from the earth it emanates from the world of earth and sky I want to read you a couple quotes and then we'll open it up this is from this book Night Headed Dragon Rider which is in many ways an account of history of Buddhism and Matheson's you know coming to Buddhism this is from a Zen master teacher Dogen who is the originator of many of the koans that people are still trying to figure out to this day when we view the four directions from a boat in the ocean where no land is in sight it applies to Matheson it looks circular and nothing else however this ocean is neither round nor square and its qualities are infinite in variety it is like a palace it is like a jewel when a fish swims in the ocean there is no limit to the water no matter how far it swims when a bird flies in the sky there is no limit to the air no matter how far it flies however no fish or bird has ever left its element since the beginning again I think that's a lot of what's going on in the snow leopard in terms of the node limit but also that which is there this is about the writing part of Matheson he's writing about Dogen in the 13th century I think this is also Peter Matheson like all born writers he wrote for the sheer exhilaration of the writing in a manner unmistakably fresh and poetic reckless and profound though the risks he takes make the prose difficult one is struck at once by an intense love of language a mastery of paradox and repetition meticulous nuance and startling image swept along by a strong lyric sensibility in a mighty effort to express the inexpressible the universal or absolute that is manifest in the simplest objects and events of everyday life you're right, sorry I shouldn't say you're right he's absolutely saying this is me yeah and so as Matheson himself says in the book it is the precise bite and feel and sound of every step that fills me with life and there's that great from Rilke that half line which Denise Leveritov used in a poem of hers and the line is each step and arrival and I think that's that's what he's doing in the in the snow leopard having no destination I am never lost each step and arrival and that of course goes along with walking meditation in Buddhism which is a form of meditation in Buddhism and you know for me if you said what's the word from the snow leopard that I take from it when he hollers out at a number of times now because that is each step and arrival all there is anything more you guys have to I just want to say I mentioned Summers that mom is a razor's edge I don't know if anyone's read it he's sort of out of fashion but I didn't say what it was about it's about an American who goes to the east and discovers is enlightened and comes back and tries to fit in with the world and that was published in 1945 45 and I'm sure Matheson read it and it's a very romantic book it's a wonderful story and a fun Hollywood movie the first not the second but that's sort of what made me think that this is a romantic book too it's the same thing it's a romance a journey it's a get back book it's that romance of going back somehow which you see over and over again in this book there's this romance of trying to make our origins play in the fields of the Lord very much on this earth basically to feel to be with that to live with that what do you folks like to say I'd like to say something I didn't notice it at first but watching the documentary I felt it was eerily similar in an Orthodox way to a Korean traditional classic story one of the few that really remains to this day is called a direct translation is a cloud of nine a dream of nine clouds and in that in the opposite to what Peter Matheson did Buddhist monk that is born into Buddhism a young monk is one of the monks around and he sees nine nuns and he just feels a sudden desire and urge not just of sexuality but of an adventure of ordinary layman things and then he goes to sleep and the next day he's reincarnated as a boy in the normal world and he has no recollection of his memories but then and the story is about him going on a life of adventure he becomes a warrior and he becomes a politician and in that story he meets all these nine women and he has romance with all these nine women and after that before his death it's been so long since I read it but around the time he dies he wakes up again the next morning and he meets the nine nuns again and in that I think it's almost exactly the opposite of what happened with Peter Matheson's life and in some way in the snow leopard but I think it comes to the same conclusion which to me was the nothingness of Nirvana and that's almost the same theme in the story I just told you and I just thought I don't know if there is an American translation of it and if there is I don't think it's really possible because there isn't much right well there is that nothingness but at the same time when you read the snow leopard you certainly feel that in and this relates to what you're talking about Peter everything really is there is being the mountains are hold on they are there and there is a word in the Buddhist tradition which is Tatha and it means suchness just that which and saying just as it is and I think that's part of the enchantment of it it's not because you know our world is so much lived under the rubric of progress which means we're always making one thing into another that's what progress apparently is you know and so he's it's suchness that he you know again this get back this trying to encounter so certainly nothingness is sure you know but suchness matters too and I think because every step in arrival it's every step is a step on earth would you call suchness and Tatha particularity yeah that's a word that I use a lot in my workshops is that you know everything needs to be a particular thing rather than just a generic thing yeah okay let's take someone else Sonia I felt the really broke open when the first time you hear about his wife's death and I felt like that was where the landscape and whatever I was interested but suddenly I see something that's also personally urgent and I was struck as I was reading how spare he is with mention of her and his son and so you know I'm just wondering what you all think of that and I'm wondering if it's that saying you can wait for it but the restraint just really I actually think restraint I mean God if we could all be a little more restrained you know and because what he's I mean to say he's writing about loss would just be a terrible thing in a way because he isn't he's writing about finding something really spectacular out of the experience and I think the idea of suchness that death goes there too that it's all part of that puzzle that you can't appreciate you can't appreciate what is there without looking at what isn't there to a certain extent and the idea that he is restrained with it is very refreshing because I think I would have I would have been a little ooh I don't really want to read that I want to read about the snow leopard and what's interesting about that is he's restrained with that too because it's all the things you don't see about this animal that are important we just see sign of it you know sign everywhere scrape and sign the animal that gets killed and that is the same kind of restraint so that it's like I was saying before some things what Scheller says maybe it's better that there are some things that we don't see that may be a good mantra to have in writing too that maybe this is really a primer about how to approach a text on a certain level that the particularity the suchness the things we don't see the fine art of omission all of that Matheson's language also shifts tremendously when he talks from the you know not you know what I mean when I call it purple prose very careful sort of nature prose writing and then when he goes into his own life he becomes it's much planer and then when he goes into spirituality it's sort of shorn of everything but he's trying to express very simple ideas but that can be complex simply and so his writing shifts so there's these three sort of areas in the book and his writing is quite different in each place that you had you think that they would have let him publish the book like this today don't you think they would have said why don't you frame it up with your wife's dad let's make that the book possibly I think also this was sort of a seminal work in its time and its effect has been now it's sort of the paradigm for many things that came afterwards it really established a kind of commentary travel well I mean there have always been those but I do think today I think editors are very craven they're market driven and they might have said there's a little bit much about Buddhism I don't know I mean publishers are everything shifts with time so I think they would have they might have but again Peter Matheson even then had stature they couldn't really mess with it I don't think it would ever get published period I don't think the world would be open to that had a hard time then it didn't come out until much later then I'm going to go about five more minutes so a couple more speaking about particular and I'm so struck by his description of the girl and herself of the because she is very particular in a way he describes her as very particular without the you know so I love that type of imagery and that's very much a now moment it's also very much a sort of a sacredness in something that you wouldn't necessarily think is sacred but what he sees in her is very sacred he calls it I mean he describes it as a very sacred moment for him so I love that and what you said about what you're not seeing I think and I could be so wrong but there's a a saying about the the space of the bowl is actually it's like an art thing but like you know there is an actual something in the space does that make any sense yeah I was struck by how often his spiritual musings grew out some great most physical physicality I was looking at page 140 where his legs are tired and stiff and he's worried about the narrow ledge then we go into this whole thing about the meaning of death why should he be afraid of falling when he's accepted the idea of death and then we get this whole euphoria around his broken in boots and there's a whole so in other words you go from the particular to a yeah a kind of related set of thoughts that and it's always grounded in the physical it felt like absolutely I'm so glad you said that because working from the detail from the ground up we want so badly because ideas happen here and we want to go from here down and impose metaphor impose meaning, impose theme, impose this but when we work from the ground up that inductive way of thinking and you work from detail and you build up it is so much more powerful the stave the stave, yeah yeah people I say to me with poems, you know where do poems come from they come into your head come up from the soles of your feet that's where poems come from the viscera this is I guess sort of a question I guess you know reading like suddenly like Siddhartha or he starts off in this place and maybe like enlightenment and comes full circle to find it again like in reading that book I come off the page and I feel a sense of like peace and calm but the end of this I don't feel that I just simply sense that he's going to go through this cycle over and over and over again do you think that's because or I don't know why but because it's a westerner going into this and coming out of it versus you know Siddhartha which is based on you know eastern tradition and then returning to it I get a sense like maybe just because I'm a westerner he's a westerner I don't believe that he'll ever have peace or something yeah yeah no I hear you I'm inclined to say Siddhartha's a work of fiction and this is a work of nonfiction so this is a human being and so those cycles are endless I mean people always say about Buddhist teachers oh they do this wrong they do that wrong you know and the answer is where human beings don't well he's a seeker and you know a seeker never finds you just keep going he will always keep going and as a writer too he was just always looking and Siddhartha is also a work of fiction by Westerner I mean like so you could maybe say that you know it allows Sue said that the true Tao cannot be spoken so you could just leave it at that on that note I think we'll end the festivities