Dec. 18 | The Cloud Forest by Peter Matthiessen

I enjoyed blogging The Snow Leopard it's now one of my favorite nonfiction books and I enjoyed savoring the book by pondering its daily journal entries and blogging the senses therein. Matthiessen's descriptions each day from Sept. 28-Dec. 1 were rich and there was rarely a day where it was difficult to find each sense (with smells being most scarce, something I've found I have to search more carefully for in my own daily senses as well).

Now, I'm going to undertake a similar slow reading project with Mattiessen's The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961). This book also follows journal entries, but they skip over time quite a bit. My aim here won't be to blog it as thoroughly as The Snow Leopard, but to read it along with the timing of the author's recorded journey beginning with the second chapter on Amazonas on Dec. 18 until the sixth chapter Beyond Black Drunken River and the last recorded dated May 6.

My novel in progress Panthera is largely set in the Amazon.

Taste: cigarettes, whiskey
Sight: porpoises; urburu (black vulture)
Sound: "When I get to number thirteen, I'll die."; little squeaks of pure excitement
Touch: hot mist
Smell: rotten stumps
Extra: Francisco de Orellana, in 1954, first reported the existence of fierce female warriors; Amazonas, the basin alone is nearly as large as the continental United States-more than two million square miles
Grateful for: awe of the Amazon

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Shel Graves' Sensorium

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