![]() ![]() “The Art of Patience,” which was ably translated by Frank Wynne, is not an homage to its precursor, to put it mildly. But now comes the Parisian writer Sylvain Tesson with “The Art of Patience,” its title a necessary accommodation to an apparently unwelcome predecessor: in French, the language in which it was written, Tesson’s book, like Matthiessen’s, is simply named for the animal. Even scholars writing about snow leopards routinely cite Matthiessen’s book, while general-interest authors, perhaps recognizing that a flag had been planted in particularly high and difficult terrain, have mostly looked elsewhere for their stories. Matthiessen dedicates roughly as many paragraphs to it as to the yeti, and of those two mysterious alpine animals he thinks he catches a glimpse of only the imaginary one.Īnd yet “The Snow Leopard” manages to convey the impression of being subtly yet fundamentally about its stated subject matter, albeit in some chimeric way-part literal, part figurative, like a creature turning midway through into a thought. Despite the book’s title, the snow leopard is almost entirely absent from its pages, faint and fleeting as a pawprint in the snow. But he sealed his connection to one of nature’s most elusive animals in 1978, with the publication of “The Snow Leopard,” which first appeared in part in this magazine and went on to win two National Book Awards, one for the now defunct category of contemporary thought, one for general nonfiction. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was a man of many other associations as well: novelist, travel writer, environmentalist, co-founder of The Paris Review, Zen Buddhist, undercover agent for the C.I.A. In this sense, the snow leopard, which clearly belongs to no one, belongs to Peter Matthiessen. Thus it could be said that the mongoose belongs to Rudyard Kipling, the mockingbird to Harper Lee, the lobster to David Foster Wallace, the cockroach to Kafka, the spider to E. B. White, and the snake to whoever wrote Genesis. Certain other authors of both fiction and nonfiction have achieved a feat like his, forging an alternative taxonomy whereby they become permanently associated with a particular creature. As a literary matter, however, it belongs, indisputably, to Herman Melville. Biologically speaking, the sperm whale belongs to the genus Physeter, to the family Physeteridae, and to that magnificent group of aquatic mammals properly called Cetacea. ![]()
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