Peter Matthiessen - The Snow Leopard (1978)

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In another life — this isn't what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one's own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.

Peter Matthiessen
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.

Peter Matthiessen
Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

Peter Matthiessen
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
Only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

Peter Matthiessen
How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?

Peter Matthiessen
We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

Peter Matthiessen