How do we learn to let go? At first glance, this question may appear to have little to do with the environment. That most cherished of society’s abstractions, the latter is indeed more likely to be described in the language of holding on—“conservation,” “preservation,” “protection”—than anything else. No doubt, the logic is tempting in its simplicity: this thing I love belongs to me, and I never want it to escape my grasp—no matter what.
But just how airtight is it?
If not an answer, then the late Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard provides something altogether far more valuable: a trial. Published almost 50 years ago, the book—a part nature travelogue, part lyrical essay—chronicles Matthiessen’s 1973 trek to Dolpo, a high-altitude cross section of the Himalayas revered for its enduring isolation from the modern world. Accompanied by the legendary field biologist George Schaller (affectionately dubbed “G.S.”) and a band of locals, Matthiessen’s goals initially seem clear enough: study the mating habits of the Himalayan blue sheep (or bharal) on its native turf, and if possible join the ranks of the few people on Earth known to have sighted its chief predator—the mythical snow leopard.
In this, Matthiessen’s book follows a clear lineage. From the journals of Lewis and Clark to the rich accounts of Darwin, Powell, and Thoreau, Western science has long been captivated by the thrill of exploration. And to be sure, The Snow Leopard contains no shortage of awe. Page to page, day by day, one can never escape the sense that every aspect of Matthiessen’s journey he found worth noting—a “turquoise lake that has never known paddle or sail,” the “zip and glisten” of a black-and-gold dragonfly, an oak forest’s “daisies and everlasting, wild strawberry”—lent a tangible poise to the landscape he ventured into. The result is a kind of physico-literary ascent: for every organism described or detour narrated, the path to Dolpo’s rolling slopes becomes that much more concrete. In Matthiessen’s memorable formulation, “If given the chance to turn back, I would not take it…Or so I write here, in the faint hope that my words may give me courage.”
Yet for all that it does to highlight the grandeur of the natural world—and it does quite a bit—The Snow Leopard can’t help but be beset by a distinctly 20th-century ache: grief. Part of this comes down to simple economics. As the societies of Asia cashed in the benefits of the Industrial (and later Green) Revolutions, their ability to capitalize on environmental destruction grew exponentially. Consequently, to the extent that Matthiessen is able to appreciate the beauty of Himalayan biota, he can only do so with the asterisk that much of it is living on borrowed time. As he puts it shortly after describing a maple forest housing a flock of redstarts, “This wilderness will certainly be gone by century’s end”—an extreme assessment that has nonetheless been directionally vindicated in the decades since.
Beyond dread for the future, however, there is a second, no less poignant layer through which grief coheres the book’s events. As Matthiessen notes in his prologue, 20 months before he set foot for Dolpo, his ex-wife Deborah (whom he lovingly refers to as simply “D”) had passed away from brain cancer. Despite recently agreeing to a divorce, the two never ceased to feel each other’s pull, with Matthiessen at one point relating that during her second hospitalization, “[s]he was frightened and depressed, and wished desperately to know that the love I felt for her was not just pity, that it had been there in some measure all along…”
In the event, the strength of that pull didn’t weaken with time or altitude. Thus on several occasions, Matthiessen devotes the bulk of his word count—previously occupied with the minutiae of Himalayan wilderness—to his relationship with D, in effect partnering with the environment to metabolize his grief for her. During one notable passage, for instance, he describes being disoriented by the yelp of a creature he can neither sight nor identify—only to then “burst out laughing, thinking how D herself would laugh at an idea so delicious as wailing with lost love in the snow mountains.” As a result, “the tears and laughter come and go, and afterward I feel soft, strung out, and relieved magically of the altitude headache with which the day had started.”
Another, more oblique means by which Matthiessen carries D’s presence is their shared personal philosophy: Zen Buddhism. Unlike its more doctrinaire cousins, Zen shuns reliance on theory, instead favoring a more hands-on reckoning with the Oneness of reality. In the book, the moment of this reckoning is staged as Matthiessen and G.S.’ eventual landing at Dolpo’s most iconic landmark, Shey Gompa (known to English-speakers as the Crystal Monastery). Not appearing until the book’s final third, the site recurs frequently in Matthiessen’s notes. And yet surprisingly, its actual arrival is quietly anticlimactic. Hollowed of monks and locked from the outside, it indeed seems to provide few opportunities beyond simple sight-seeing—a pretty view, sure, but not much else.
This, of course, is precisely the point. Despite lacking access to its interior, Matthiessen achieves communion with the Crystal Monastery by means of one simple act—that of sharing the space in which it dwells. In his words:
“Though I am blind to it, the Truth is near, in the reality of what I sit on—rocks. These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp…that ‘form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’—the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything.”
Much like the snow leopard itself (which indeed never appears once in the book), then, the monastery embodies a beauty more common than any other: the kind we can never possess. Instead it can only be appreciated from afar, our ache for it ringing but never heard or requited. Yet perhaps that type of appreciation is exactly what our planet needs most. As many have already noted, global conservation tends to be heavily biased in favor of species for whom we feel a strong sense of personal kinship—elephants, lions, chimpanzees—rather than those most at risk of going extinct. Given that the latter are typically too small and/or remote to reach us in the same ways as the former, it may thus be time to learn to value them as Matthiessen did the Crystal Monastery (or D, or the snow leopard)—from afar.
Granted, revising an entire civilization’s relationship to nature overnight is no simple feat. And yet in practice, the greater difficulty may lie at the level of the psyche—we’re naturally wired to hold onto the things we love, so why would we ever love something we could never hold? By design, the question answers itself: we want to hold onto what we love, but that isn’t a requirement for us to love it. And in those cases where enforcing that requirement does it a disservice, then the best thing we can do for it—and ourselves—isn’t to keep demanding it join our side.
It’s to let go.
Works Referenced
[1]: Matthiessen, P. The Snow Leopard, Penguin Classics, 1978.
[2]: Dhyani, S. “Are Himalayan ecosystems facing hidden collapse?” Biodiversity & Conservation, Vol. 32, 10 Aug. 2023, pp. 3731-3764, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10531-023-02692-x
[3]: Kim, A. “You Win Some, You Lose Many: Conservation Bias Fails The Most Vulnerable,” faunalytics, 16 Jul. 2025, https://faunalytics.org/you-win-some-you-lose-many-conservation-bias-fails-the-most-vulnerable/