When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

In 1965 Matthiessen publiPeter Matthiessend At Play in the Fields of the Lord a novel about a group of American missionaries and their encounter with a South American indigenous tribe. Before practicing Zen Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. A.

According to critic Michael Dirda "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops savannas and the sea. His nonfiction has featured nature and travel -- notably The Snow Leopard (1978) -- or American Indian issues and history -- notably a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction has occasionally been adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name.