immaterial being

I’ve kept an issue of Time magazine that’s over 18 years old because it has a short article on Peter Matthiessen. In the article, Matthiessen is described as “an environmentalist before the term was fashionable - just as he was a ‘searcher’ before it became a 60’s job description, and an apostle of ‘male wildness’ before Robert Bly got out his drums… . For what other Zen-minded patriarch can claim to be a founding editor of the Paris Review? How many other American novelists have written whole books in Caribbean patois that were influenced by the principles of classical Japanese art? How many other New Yorker writers have taken part-Cheyenne mercenaries for their alter egos? And which other scion of America’s Eastern ruling class has devoted 628 pages and seven years of libel suits to defending the name of a young Native American charged with murder?”