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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

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Peter Matthiessen
Age: 86 †
Born: 1927
Born: May 22
Died: 2014
Died: April 5
Author
Historian
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Shoulders
Loads
Rivers
Rendered
Pass
Load
Figures
Sunset
Dark
Bank
Upon
Beneath
Immortal
Streak
River
Streaks

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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 ever having discovered what it was.
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When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks.
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I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.
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It is said in Java that the tiger's hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils.
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In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
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If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.
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The purpose of our life is to help others through it.
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It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.
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For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light for my children's children, the power, peace and healing of the night will be obliterated.
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You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.
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In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.
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Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!
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Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?
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I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange... There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.
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The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
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It's a simplification to say that the men [during Stone Age] went to war to maintain their dominance over the women. The men would help dig agricultural ditches because they were superb farmers. That was very heavy lifting work. But then they just preened themselves, and put bird-of-paradise plumes [in their hair], and smoked dope.
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Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
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In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
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I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled.
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Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.
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