Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, explorer, and Zen teacher. He had great success in fiction and nonfiction, often writing about environmental themes and concerns. His works on spiritual insights about nature, travel, and the fragility of the human condition, turned him into a New Age guru.
Born into a wealthy family in New York City, Matthiessen served in the U.S. Navy 1945–47 and studied at Yale. He had his first short story published in the Atlantic Monthly when he was still a student at Yale-recruited by the CIA while at Yale, he briefly served as a covert agent in France. There, he co-founded The Paris Review literary magazine to cover his spying.
After quitting the agency, Matthiessen turned to journalism, writing a series of reports on endangered species for Sports Illustrated, which became the basis for Wildlife in America (1959.) The book’s success allowed Matthiessen to venture farther afield. He trekked through South America for his book The Cloud Forest (1961; serialized in The New Yorker) and hiked the Himalayas writing The Snow Leopard (1978; National Book Award.)
Matthiessen’s travels also fueled his writing of novels. His At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) established him as a prominent novelist. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) delved into the history of the Sioux nation and its relationship with the U.S.
Matthiessen became the first writer to have won the National Book Award in fiction and nonfiction with his novel Shadow Country (2008,) about a Florida plantation owner.
Buddhism became Matthiessen’s primary focal point for the last 40 years of his life. He eventually became a Zen monk and established a Buddhist retreat center at his home on Long Island, New York.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Peter Matthiessen
In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind.
—Peter Matthiessen
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
—Peter Matthiessen
Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past and there is no reality apart from the here and now.
—Peter Matthiessen
Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.
—Peter Matthiessen
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
—Peter Matthiessen
The variety of life in nature can be compared to a vast library of unread books, and the plundering of nature is comparable to the random discarding of whole volumes without having opened them, and learned from them. Our critical dependence on the great variety of nature for the progress we have already made has been amply documented. Indifference to the loss of species is, in effect, indifference to the future, and therefore a shameful carelessness about our children.
—Peter Matthiessen
The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clich