|  |
No Man is an Island (1955)
by Thomas Merton
264 pages - Barnes & Noble Books
'We make ourselves real by telling the truth. Man can hardly forget that he needs to know the truth, for the instinct to know is too strong in us to be destroyed. But he can forget how badly he also needs to tell the truth. We cannot know truth unless we ourselves are conformed to it.' (pg.188) This book of meditations on various subjects is one which Merton, in his introduction, considers in a way a sequel to his book New Seeds of Contemplation, though it covers more basic and down-to-earth material than the previous book. With chapter titles such as "Conscience, Freedom, and Prayer", "Being and Doing", "Sincerity", and "Recollection", each chapter is further broken down into numbered sections consisting of a few paragraphs where Merton expands on a thought. The title of the book comes from a line by John Donne, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Merton returns to this theme throughout the book, not treating it simply as metaphor but instead as a quite literal description of reality, both in the sense that each Christian is a part of the Mystical Body of Christ, and also that God dwells within each and every person, and indeed in every single atom of existence. We work out our own destiny individually, but at the same time we are tied inexorably to the fate of other souls, both living and dead. It's pretty good, but I'd probably start elsewhere if I was reading Merton for the first time.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
|
The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (1948)
by Thomas Merton
467 pages - Harvest
This is the autobiography of Thomas Merton, from his birth until the time when he took his vows at a Cistercian monastery at the age of 33. Merton was born in France, but in his early years his family moved often between France and Britain and the US. His mother died when he was young, and his father also passed away before he entered university. Merton first attended Cambridge University in England, but because of his freewheeling ways he was made to understand that he did not have a future there, and so he moved back to America and enrolled at Columbia. It was during his time at Columbia that he became more and more drawn to the Catholic Church, finally converting and being baptized. In his post-university years he did some teaching as he tried to discover his calling, finally becoming a Trappist monk and closing himself up in monastic duties for the rest of his life; as he put it, "the four walls of my new freedom." His only sibling, a brother, died soon after Thomas had entered the monastery, while fighting with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II.
This is quite a remarkable book, and the above summary doesn't do much justice to it at all. People have compared it favourably to St. Augustine's Confessions, but I thought that while that book was somewhat dull and obtuse, this one was full of life and immediacy. But perhaps that's just because Merton's times are so much closer to our own. Merton does not talk down to the reader, but he doesn't try to make things too complicated either. You can see that he's intelligent and well-read, but not without his faults or weaknesses. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is that it doesn't come across on simply an intellectual level, or as a recorded series of events, but with the full force and richness of life experience. Which is what Merton thought literature should truly be.
The book was written with Merton still in the first fervour of his conversion and his decision to dedicate his life to being a Trappist, and so it can come off as very fiery and a bit absolutist at times; and I think I was helped by my earlier reading of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which was a biography of four American Catholic writers, including Merton, and illuminated some of the things Merton continued to struggle with, drawing especially from his journals which were published after his death. Merton certainly wasn't perfect, and he sometimes seems even quite flaky and restless, but the great advantage of the sacrifices he made and of his works is that they afford the possibility for the reader to recognize some common ground in each individual soul's struggle towards the light.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)
by Thomas Merton
297 pages - New Directions
This a book of thoughts about contemplation, related in a mostly conversational tone. Some of it is probably advanced enough only to be applicable to a monk or nun, but most of it easily applies to anyone with an interest in prayer or meditation. This book is a revised and expanded version of a previously-published book called Seeds of Contemplation, hence the title.
This is widely considered Merton's greatest work, and I also thought it was quite good; though at 300 pages it's a bit long. You'd probably need at least a bit of a mystic outlook to get anything out of it. I'd readily admit that several aspects of it probably went over my head, and it would be interesting to read through it again several years from now.
'To think that you are somehow obliged to follow the author of the book to his own particular conclusion would be a great mistake.' (pg.215)
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century (1960)
edited and translated by Thomas Merton
81 pages - New Directions
This is a little collection of sayings of the desert hermits of the 4th century who separated themselves from society and went into the desert regions of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia. Merton has selected these himself, not to any scholarly or doctrinal purpose, but just picking what he thought might be good and pleasing. Merton includes a twenty-some page introduction, which was the part I enjoyed most. The selections themselves are from the Verba Seniorum, and they range from enlightening to mundane to puzzling. It's very similar to anthologies of Taoist or Zen sayings.
It's interesting to read through, but doesn't give a lot of information about the Desert Fathers themselves, or the wider world they existed in, which was something I was curious about. I guess I'll need to find another work that deals with that.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
|
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003)
by Paul Elie
555 pages - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
This is a well-written, deep, searching, and fascinating look at four American Catholic writers who gained prominence after WWII. In her short life, Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and many short stories of unsurpassed artistic quality. Walker Percy, whose father and grandfather had committed suicide, was a doctor who came down with tuberculosis, and became a novelist and self-taught philosopher. Dorothy Day was the founder of The Catholic Worker, which started as a newspaper and grew into a family of missions for the poor and destitute, as well as a nonviolent peace movement. Thomas Merton gained a wide audience for his writing after he became a Trappist monk and wrote material rooted in autobiography. Though they never formed any kind of formal movement, as they grew in prominence they either met and corresponded, or at least read and were affected by each other's work.
Except for the introduction and epilogue, the book mostly flows chronologically. This means that O'Connor, because of her late birth and early death, is the last to arrive and the first to leave. However, it also gives the book the feeling of a sort of novel with four distinct, fascinating characters, and the story emerges like the exciting action of a novel, and you feel cheered by successes and heartbroken by defeats. O'Connor is the only one born and raised a Catholic, believing from the beginning to the end; all the others being converts from a sort of vague popular secularism they previously swam in.
It's a book I read deeply and reflected on much. Four very different people, each finding their own way, sometimes coming together to find understanding, while sometimes seeing the sparks of conflict fly. A very different and unique look at the development of four writers, far from the usual popular psychology and worn-out cliches. Much of that is likely due to the author Elie, who writes with impressive literary clarity (this is his first book) and seems to have read an amazing amount of primary, secondary, and tertiary material. These were all people that were very gifted, and one of the themes of the book is how their early reading of great books of fiction and non-fiction, and then, in their later life, their writing and the reading of each other's work, helped them along the way to discover their own selves, and helped them along the pilgrimage of the subtitle.
But, this is certainly not hagiography (though the process toward canonization is underway for Dorothy Day). Each person is presented with their flaws, sometimes glaring. Merton, to me personally, came across as extremely flakey, unstable, and it cast doubt on just how much basis there was for anything he wrote. Percy is the one I identify with most, but he's unfortunately the least present (or so it seemed to me) as he did not have a lot of dramatic correspondence or public presence, living a very everyday life and working at things slowly, never displaying bold strokes of genius. As I've said, certainly a book I've read deeply, though, perhaps ironically, somewhere near the end I felt a sort of ease in my heart that I, who was brought up 'nominally' Catholic, should probably stop trying so hard to believe in things that have never meant much to me, like the liturgy or holy communion or the suffering and death of Christ as atonement for our individual sins, but instead trust in the inclinations of my own soul, 'crypto-religious' (to use a term used by Czeslaw Milosz, who corresponded with Merton) as it may be. Though I don't really keep track of such things, so I couldn't say for certain, this certainly feels like the best book I have read all year.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}