A Year With Thomas Merton - January 15

One Dog's Good Afternoon

This afternoon--a quiet walk in the sun: again down by St. Bernard's pond. The Gannons' dog tagged along--the pretty collie bitch with a feathery tail--running busily into everything, immense interest in all kinds of smells, mysteries, secrets in the bushes and in the grass. She ran on the melting ice, rolled in the manure spread over the pasture (rolled twice!), came out of the brush with her tail full of dead leaves, and, in a final paroxysm of energy, chased a cat into the cow barn. A completely successful afternoon for her anyway!!

I had Martin Buber's Ten Rungs in my pocket and couldn't read a line of it, only looked at the sun, the dead grass, the green soft ice, the blue sky, and felt utterly blank. Will there never be any peace on earth in our lifetime? Will they never do anything but kill, and then kill some more? Apparently they are caught in that impasse: the system is completely violent and involved in violence, and there is no way out but violence, and that leads only to more violence. Really--what is ahead but the apocalypse?

January 26, 1968, VII.47