by Peter Matthiessen (1972)
A perfect moment. …
Sitting in the outdoor hot tub looking out over Pismo Beach. Listening to classic Matthiessen as an audio book.
Africa in the 1960s
On the great East African plain it is the human who feels himself the intruder. Here, and perhaps only here, the world is that of the animals. It is they who belong, as humans do not. In the more sensitive traveler this evokes a feeling of being privileged to observe ancient forms, settings and behavior that have survived intact from pre-history.
“Matthiessen has the language to express this feeling of awe…Matthiessen also goes into the relationships between humans past and present in East Africa’s great fauna with many a flash of insight into the instincts each has bred in the other…This is the Africa book par excellence.”
Here’s where Matthiessen first met famed field biologist George Schaller, the man he’d join in the Himalayan adventures documented in The Snow Leopard, one of my very favourite books.
Both Schaller and Matthiessen are still alive. In fact Matthiessen in 2008, at age 81, received his second National Book Award for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s. (41hrs audio)
Rick McCharles 