The Snow Leopard
Matthiessen trekked to the Himalayas of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and wrote a meditation on Buddhism, grief (his wife had just died of cancer), and the nature of searching. The snow leopard is almost never seen. That's the point.
Matthiessen's wife had died of cancer a year and a half earlier, and he left their eight-year-old son at home to go look for enlightenment in Nepal; the book confesses this and never quite answers it, and many readers cannot hear the dharma over it. The Zen arrives pre-polished, insight on schedule, a well-funded American's spiritual expedition with porters carrying the gear. He never sees the leopard. He tells us that is the point. It is a very writerly point.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
