If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us. — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“A far cicada rings high and clear over the river’s heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all. — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“...experience was static in the valley; it was older than time itself, for time was a thing of but two generations, dated by moons… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
“In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” “I was there!”-surely that is… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak… — Peter Matthiessen Copy Share Image
