Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

“The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow...These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

‘Pitched past pitch of grief….

O the mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The book is a meditation upon death, suffering, loss, memory and healing. Matthiessen's wife, the poet Deborah Love, had died of cancer the year before at the age of 44.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Schaller and Matthiessen succeed in seeing several herds of bharal at the beginning of the rutting season. Schaller is ecstatic at the turn of events and obsessively records all he can regarding the animal's mating and social habits, of which little is known throughout the western scientific community.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Matthiessen never does get to see a snow leopard, though some weeks after Matthiessen returns to Kathmandu Schaller writes to say that he has seen one crossing an ice field.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. 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 Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Matthiessen died in April 2014.

 

"No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path."

Buddha

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Snow Leopard won the 1979 National Book Award in the category Contemporary Thought and the 1980 National Book Award for Nonfiction (paperback). It has been included in several lists of best travel books including World Hum's ten most celebrated books, Washington Post Book World's Travel Books That Will Take You Far, and National Geographic Traveler's Around the World in 80 books.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"From deep in the earth, the roar of the river rises. The rhododendron leaves along the precipice are burnished silver, but night still fills the steep ravines where southbound migrants descend at day to feed and rest. The golden birds fall away from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark."

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Schaller's work in conservation has resulted in the protection of large stretches of area in the Amazon, Brazil, the Hindu Kush in Pakistan, and forests in Southeast Asia. Due in part to Schaller's work, over 20 parks or preserves worldwide have been established, including Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the Shey-Phoksundo National Park in Nepal, and the Chang Tang Nature Reserve, one of the world's most significant wildlife refuges. At over 200,000 miles (320,000 km), the Chang Tang Nature Reserve is triple the size of America's largest wildlife refuge, and was called "One of the most ambitious attempts to arrest the shrinkage of natural ecosystems," by The New York Times.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

'As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.'

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav

 

 

[telerites]

The sacred mountain of Dolpo is called She-Re Drug da, which translates as "Dolpo Crystal Mountain of The Dragon's Roar".

 

 

That is stunning!

[Flex Mentallo]

Lost Horizon

 

“Then the whole range, much nearer now, paled into fresh splendor; a full moon rose, touching each peak in succession like some celestial lamplighter, until the long horizon glittered against a blue-black sky.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

James Hilton is said to have been inspired to write Lost Horizon, and to invent "Shangri-La" by reading the National Geographic Magazine articles of Joseph Rock, an Austrian-American botanist and ethnologist exploring the southwestern Chinese provinces and Tibetan borderlands.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The book was published in 1933. Soon after Frank Capra, then perhaps Hollywood's leading director, decided to turn it into a movie.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

At a cost of $2 million it was one of the most expensive films made to that time. It took 2 years to complete.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"I was a little disappointed in Lost Horizon myself. It was my idea entirely to do it, but I was disappointed in the way it came out, because I’d hoped for more. Although it’s been said that it’s one of my best pictures (and perhaps I’d have to agree with them), I thought that the main part of the film – I should have done better, somehow. I got lost in architecture, in utopia, in the never-never-land, and it was only toward the end of the picture that I got back on track with human beings and individuals, where I began to feel that the story dealt with human beings again. This is common, for one who wants to exploit a theme, and gives the theme too much of the story."

Frank Capra

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

The war-torn Chinese city of Baskul in 1935, where Robert Conway has been sent to evacuate ninety white people before they are butchered in a local revolution.

 

“Did you make that report out yet? Did you say we saved the lives of ninety white people? Good. Hooray for us! Did you say that we left ten thousand natives down there to be annihilated? No. No, you wouldn’t say that. They don’t count.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

With a handful of Europeans he and his brother George board the last DC-2 passenger plane out of the flaming airport.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

He eventually realizes they're flying in the wrong direction, not East toward Shanghai and civilization, but West toward the mountainous Himalayas in Tibet.