Words of Support

Over the past few months we have collected a series of testimonials highlighting the resounding impact Peter has had on individuals near and far, expressing support for the Peter Matthiessen Center. From literary figures, environmental scholars, human rights activists, spiritual leaders, dear old friends and those whose lives were touched simply with his prose - we would like to share some of these words with you here.

We would love to hear from you and warmly welcome words of support for the Center and why Peter’s legacy is meaningful to you. Please email us at: info@matthiessencenter.org & thank you!

Bill McKibben

environmentalist, author & founder of 350.org

“I live a half mile through the woods from the cabin where Robert Frost spent the last 40 years of his writing life. It’s been preserved by Middlebury College, and over the years has become a quiet but well-loved asset for the local, and the world, community. Often I’ll wander through the forest and come out at the cabin, and there will be a solitary soul, just sitting on the rock out front and reading from a book of his poems. 

Peter Matthiessen is clearly one of the great literary and historical figures of our time and place. He meant a great deal to many people—and that significance will only grow over the course of this century as his message about environmentalism and about mindfulness sink further into the global consciousness. Preserving the place where he worked would be a great service—and to do it in a way that allowed a few to gather there from time to time to carry on his work would be a greater service. 

I hope you are able to find a way forward. In our overbusy, overstimulated world, the value of a retreat like this cannot be overstated.”

Pico Iyer

essayist & novelist

“Peter Matthiessen was not only one of the most distinguished American writers of the past half-century, but one of the most versatile: the rare novelist-naturalist to win National Book Awards in both fiction and non-fiction, while writing about every corner of the world and, for almost thirty years, leading generations of fellow students in Zen practice. Whether writing about the environment, championing the nation’s indigenous peoples or coming up with entirely new forms for the novel, he was always breaking new ground, but with a classical elegance and precision that made him feel like a scientist of the new.

I was thrilled, therefore, when I heard that there will be a Center to commemorate the values and practices that Peter so richly embodied—and to carry them over to new generations. As someone who goes back and forth between the writing desk and the monastery, as someone who has spent much of his life traveling the world and feels that there is no issue so urgent as climate change, I couldn’t be more delighted at the prospect of a unique place of retreat where people can gather to craft sentences, to discuss our responsibilities to the planet and to clear our heads and look directly at reality. Everyone I know would be in the debt of such a center, and of the conversations - and silences - it would foster.”

David Quammen

author, journalist & National Geographic contributor

“Peter was a vastly important exemplar to me as I found my own way, from fiction to nonfiction and into the wild, as a writer. He was a sort of literary elder brother, inspirational yet relatable, even before I met him. My first acquaintance with his name occurred, I think, at the dinner table of Robert Penn Warren and his wife, the novelist Eleanor Clark. This would have been in 1969 or 1970, after Red Warren had adopted me as a protégé and I had lived with the Warrens and their two brilliant children, Rosanna and Gabriel, as a sort of car-driving, tennis-partnering, kids-tending summer assistant in Vermont. At some point either Red or Eleanor told me of this young friend of theirs, Matthiessen, who was writing the sorts of books and chasing the sorts of adventures that seemed, in their eyes, correctly, to beckon me. So I bought and read his book on Africa, with photos by Eliot Porter: The Tree Where Man Was Born. What a magnificent title, I thought. Yes, I thought, that’s the kind of thing a writer should do. 

I read Wildlife in America, with its heart-ripping account of the extinction of the great auk, around the time I got deeply concerned about losses of biological diversity. I read The Snow Leopard, of course, a book of unique and painful wondrousness. I read Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord and, eventually, most of his oeuvre, including the magnificent Mr. Watson trilogy at the end, itself an amazing sort of tree, with its three great limbs soaring skyward and its roots fertilized by Faulkner. But before that trio of books came along, I had been lucky enough to get to know Peter himself. 

By happy circumstance of mutual friends and his fondness for Montana, he became a friend both to me and, independently, to my wife Betsy—a dear, generous, amusing friend, with a sly sense of humor and a wide, mischievous smile. With Betsy he shared a deep interest in Mongolian Buddhism, and he served (as a figurehead and private advisor) on the board of her Mongolia-involved conservation NGO, The Tributary Fund. He had his own assigned room in our house whenever he wanted it (which was too rarely), and he welcomed us to his, in Sagaponack, delivering to us the blessing of another friendship: with the amazing Maria.

All told, he gifted me in four ways: he showed me, as a reader, new possibilities in the overlap of nonfiction and literary art; he praised my writing; I think he enjoyed my company (especially when it also included Betsy’s); and I know he relished my martinis. 

We miss him. But the books remain.”

Rose Styron

poet, journalist & human rights activist

“My husband Bill and I were very close friends with Peter starting in the early ‘50’s in Paris and Rome, marked by the birth of the Paris Review and Bill’s and my marriage.  Peter joined us for weeks on our long honeymoon in Ravello. Years later we returned the favor by traveling to Venezuela with him and lovely Maria on theirs.

Once long ago, by sheer chance, we met Peter in Africa, and joined forces on a safari with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan who became an important backer of the Paris Review. Over the decades, we celebrated milestone occasions like Peter’s birthdays in Italy and Russia or Bill’s in Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard, with annual visits to our house in Roxbury and the Matthiessens in Sagaponack where we relaxed walking the beach, sitting in the garden while our guys talked about their books-in-progress before Maria treated us to dinner with special neighbors.

Peter and I—sometimes joined by our spouses and children—enjoyed many many wild life adventures on several continents and seas, usually organized by Victor Emanuel, or by Maria in Italy, Africa, or by me on the small Bahamian isle: Salt Cay.

I supported Peter actively in his ‘political’ endeavors, especially in defense of Leonard Peltier.

More private memories are special. Peter was our son Tom’s godfather, a cherished attentive one. He presided with his beautiful words at Tom’s wedding, and then at Bill’s funeral, both on Martha’s Vineyard. I look daily at photographs of Peter around the Vineyard house where I live now, always thinking back on my encounters with ever-charming, fun-loving, deep-thinking, purposeful, spiritual, excellent writer and nature master Peter, hoping his son Alex will visit again soon. Victor anointed Peter with the bird name he delighted in: Curlew. I forget for the moment whose line of poetry began ‘Curlew cry me down’.”

George B. Schaller

mammalogist, biologist, conservationist & author - Wildlife Conservation Society

“It is a pleasure and an honor for me to write this strong letter of support for your planned Peter Matthiessen Center devoted to the conservation of nature, to all sentient beings both plants and animals. Judging by my association with Peter, he would be absolutely delighted with your plans. He viewed nature with love, compassion, respect, and empathy as is so evident from his writings. 

The Center would perpetuate and spread his vision. I first met Peter in the late 1960s when he visited the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania where I was with my family studying lions. I admired his interests and attitudes, and we kept in touch. When I planned a trip to western Nepal in 1973 to study blue sheep and other Himalayan wildlife, Peter was keen to accompany me especially because the local people are Tibetan Buddhists. 

The result, of course, was Peter's marvelous and iconic book The Snow Leopard. 

As you know, in 2016 I repeated the trek, this time with Peter's son Alex. The purpose of this trek was to gain insight into the cultural changes that had occurred in this remote area during the past half-century, but I also greatly enjoyed reliving the past with Alex. Your proposed Center for ‘important dialogue and advocacy, creative inspiration, environmental action and spiritual contemplation’, to quote your letter, is a marvelous idea. Such a Center is greatly needed to remind people of the moral imperative to help heal this wounded planet.  Indeed, hundreds of such centers are required to promote the ethics, aesthetics, and spiritual values of nature and the rights of every species to exist. 

You will create a model which others will want to emulate. What a wonderful legacy that will be for Peter and all those who so admire his writing.. Everything in nature is connected and your Center will promote such unity and harmony to everyone it touches. So I wish you heartfelt success in your planning and fund raising, and I look forward to hearing more about this treasured Center.”

Carl Safina

New York Times best-selling author, ecologist & founder of the Safina Center

“It would be hard to overstate the influence Peter Matthiessen had on my life. I discovered his writing when I was around 14 years old. Before that it had never occurred to me that a human being could live a life so big and full of adventure. Just understanding that led me to aspire to a life vastly different from those around me.

In my twenties The Snow Leopard’s lesson that every moment is miraculous and filled with awe-someness, changed my way of looking at everything. And of course, when I later aspired to write, I aspired to write as well and as powerfully and as much in my own voice as Peter.

He set a very high bar and always seemed to be looking over my shoulder as I wrote. I still feel that way. And in the 15 years I knew him personally, I also discovered what a force for kindness he - and therefore all of us - could be.”

Alexandra Parsons Wolfe

executive director of Preservation Long Island

“I am among the many people who claim that The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen changed their lives. Framed as a travelogue, it’s a book that reflects Matthiessen’s deep interest in Zen Buddhism, a practice he shared with others on Long Island where he lived for over 50 years. That Matthiessen’s Sagaponack home-studio-zendo still exists is a gift. It’s a place that warrants preservation and adaptive reuse so that the spirit of a great writer’s legacy can continue in the very place where he chose to live and work.”

George Archibald

co-founder & senior conservationist, International Crane Foundation

“In 1993 Russian colleagues hosted kindred spirits from China, South Korea and Japan to travel by ferry boat up the Amur river to discuss international cooperation in the conservation of endangered cranes and storks. We were overjoyed and humbled that the great Peter Matthiessen joined us. The Vice President of the International Crane Foundation, the late Jim Harris, and I hoped that this might be the beginning of a long and productive union with one our times greatest authors.

Little did we know that this new friendship would last a lifetime and result in Peter’s  Birds of Heaven – a comprehensive account of the cranes of the world. During the decade that followed, Jim and I and many colleagues worldwide poured our facts and thoughts into Peters creative mind. We all knew it would result in a monumental work. We were not disappointed and the cranes and their plight became a new reality to thousands. 

We soon discovered Peter’s vulnerability to drift off into thought forgetting some of this more mundane things in life. Lacking a visa for Mongolia at the Russian border,  he returned in the middle of the night to my hotel in a Russian city wondering where he might find a Mongolian consulate. Following two weeks of comprehensive field work in Australia, Peter and I flew to India. After leaving the airport in New Delhi Peter discovered he left his notes from Australia on the aircraft. They were never retrieved.

Peter’s personal vulnerability endeared him even more to us. Peter’s beloved wife, Maria, said following his passing, ‘A great tree had fallen.’ For those of us who new Peter, the man, there will always be a void. For those that knew him only through his work, he will always live through collection of remarkable literature - a gift to mankind for all time.”

Scott Chaskey

farmer, poet & pioneer of the community farming movement

“In a transitional time, when my wife Megan and I returned to the U.S. after a decade away, the Zendo and Peter’s presence pulsed with a ‘homing’ message, much like the message the migratory birds overhead responded to (as we meditated). We were introduced to the Zendo by Megan’s mother, Connie Fox, who had been ‘sitting’ with Peter and a small group of Zen students since c. 1979.

Hans Hokanson, artist, monk, master woodworker, lured me in as carpenter’s helper with level, claw-hammer, and Japanese saw. With cedar, spruce, pine, and a Swede’s design a one-time horse stable was reborn as a Zendo. Muryo Roshi blessed our infant daughter Rowenna in this space, and Connie was married to sculptor William King, officiated by Roshi, in the garden.

‘Yesterday goes forth from this moment, and today comes forth from this place’ (Eihei Dogen). To return to it, for me—as I hope it will be for countless others—is to lift the latch of a ‘gateless gate,’ and to hear ‘The raw radiance of a thousand birds / on a straw field of frost,’ and the careful, instructive words of a master writer, gifted Zen teacher, and forever friend of the natural world.”

Megan Chaskey

poet, author, musician, educator & integrative healing practitioner

“Peter Matthiessen, my first spiritual teacher, introduced me to spiritual practice with powerful presence, heart for the natural world and wild spirit, and focused awareness, all through kindness, compassion and a lineage of wisdom.

Scott and I came to know Muryo Roshi and the Zendo community through my mother, Connie Fox who was amongst the first to sit Zen with them at his house and in the Zendo once it was created by Hans Hokanson from the horse stables on the Matthiessen property. In the spirit of community, I sewed Han's monk’s robes for him in exchange for a beautiful redwood table he made for me. His woodworking craft are seen in the round windows behind the altars, the carved inner door and the beautiful Swedish touch of simplicity throughout the Zendo. 

In the beginning years, a wood burning stove heated the Zendo, and the sound of the fire and that particular kind of warmth set a beautiful tone in the stillness and silence during our Zen practice. On walking with reverence into that sacred space I felt I was coming home to a deep place within, especially welcome to me as a young mother. 

Walking the spiritual path as it ever evolves, I am deeply grateful for the foundation that Zen meditation has given me in my life, anchored in Buddhist values, guided by true spiritual teachings that echo in my awareness through the voice of a dear teacher.”

John Turner

Long Island naturalist & co-founder of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society 

"Like most people I met Peter Matthiesen through his books. The Wind Birds, a treatise on shorebirds, which was the first book of his I read, opened up a world of windswept places and wild landscapes. I soon learned in seeking out shorebirds what Peter had learned earlier, that shorebirds - plovers, sandpipers and curlews and whimbrels - are ‘a high beauty passing swiftly... leaving us in solitude on an empty beach, with summer gone, and a wind blowing’.

He further opened the window to the wonders of the natural world with his stunning The Birds of Heaven, an exploration of the world's 15 crane species. His chapter ‘The Sadness of Marshes’ led me to learn about and visit, to see for myself, the vast flocks of Sandhill Cranes that descend, like an eternal clock, upon Nebraska's Platte River in the third week of March each year. His writing led me to 600,000 cranes and for that I'm eternally grateful."

Michael Haggiag

writer & co-founder of The Zen Gateway

“When I first met Peter I was a young American publisher working in London. It was 1979. He was already a famous novelist and travel writer and had recently released The Snow Leopard to great acclaim, so my chances of landing him as an author were slim to non-existent.  However, during a trip to Africa one of my partners, Tom Arnold, had met a flinty colonial relic called Brian Nicholson who had once managed the Selous Game Reserve, the largest remaining expanse of true wilderness in East Africa. Tom convinced Brian to take him on safari through his old stomping grounds and tried to persuade me to publish a book about it. Since Tom had become infatuated with Africa he was willing to organize the trip as well as foot the bill, so I knew I had to come up with a plan.

As luck would have it, I had a copy of Peter’s 1972 classic The Tree Where Man Was Born and took a closer look at it. I was immediately enchanted by the chiseled prose, the detailed descriptions of Africa and the fervent, almost mystical passion for nature that flowed from every page. Surely this was the author who could answer my prayers. On cue my wife Katharine casually mentioned that one of her childhood friends knew Peter so introductions were swiftly arranged.  To my lasting astonishment it turned out he was interested. I then contacted Viking Press, his U.S. publisher, who quickly came aboard. After a maniacal flurry of activity we even managed to get Hugo Van Lawick, the celebrated wildlife photographer and husband of Jane Goodall, to join the expedition. 

Sand Rivers came out in 1981. It had all the qualities of Peter’s best nature writing but brought with it a prescient warning about poachers in a continent wracked by poverty and political upheaval. In a clever novelistic twist he portrayed Brian Nicholson and himself as antagonists at complete odds with each other politically and philosophically but united in their love of nature and desire to preserve the Selous wilderness. 

In 1982, helped I am convinced by the publicity the book gave the area, the Selous Game Reserve became a UNESCO heritage site. Yet it continues to battle for its survival to this day. ‘The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoliation of a continent which we once confused with progress’ - these words of Peter suggest a very different, more ambivalent attitude to adventure than earlier 20th Century American writers like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In his inward-looking idealism, his spiritual searching and his lifelong environmental activism, Peter is more akin to the early Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is no wonder that Zen Buddhism, with its own deep roots in the spiritual values of the natural world, should have found such a ready and eager adherent in him. 

I recall a brief conversation we had while driving through London in my car. I asked him whether he meditated every day. It was a loaded question. I too had become interested in Zen and knew how critically important regular sitting was to the practice. “No,” he replied nonchalantly. “But I need to get back to it.” At the time I thought to myself that despite his wonderful insights and beautiful prose he couldn’t really be much of a Zen student. 

Years later, when I visited his Ocean Zendo in Sagaponack, I understood how wrong I had been. He had not only matured as a Zen practitioner but also developed into a teacher of genuine warmth and compassion.  What I had mistaken for lack of seriousness was instead the natural response of a man who didn’t feel he needed to put on any airs. This is a very rare quality in a celebrity.  I have known quite a few famous people in my life, and however charming and engaging they are, some posturing and self-importance invariably seeps through. What I find in much of Peter’s writing is the same honesty and willingness to reveal his own limitations that he showed me in person.  It makes him all the more authentic and appealing. Somewhere Peter quotes the metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne, ‘You never enjoy the world aught, till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars’ (Centuries of Meditation).

I suddenly realized that the different strands of this man of many parts – adventure, literature, meditation, conservation – all flowed from this one source: the strength and willingness to be awed by life. This is surely the key to Peter’s lasting relevance. The other day my 36-year-old son asked me about The Snow Leopard. He had just learned about it from an enthusiastic friend and wanted me to buy the book for his birthday. I was delighted to do so and look forward to discussing it with him. Returned from our own travels after many years living abroad, my wife and I now live close to Peter’s old home in Sagaponack. Sometimes I pass it on my way to the ocean and look wistfully in its direction. I believe a Peter Matthiessen Center on its beautiful grounds would not only pay tribute to a great American writer but also be a wonderful addition to the community, encouraging us - as Peter did - to open our hearts to the grandeur and majesty of nature. It would also support new writers, conservation, and meditation in a way that continues Peter’s profound investigation into the source of our true happiness and collective well-being.