A Year With Thomas Merton - October 22

The Birds Don't Know They Have Names

The warblers are coming through now. Very hard to identify them all, even with field glasses and a bird book. (Have seen at least one that is definitely not in the bird book.) Watching one which I took to be a Tennessee warbler. A beautiful, neat, prim little thing--seeing this beautiful thing which people do not usually see, looking into this world of birds, which is not concerned with us or with our problems, I felt very close to God or felt religious anyway. Watching those birds was as food for meditation, or as mystical reading. Perhaps better.

Also the beautiful, unidentified red flower or fruit I found on a bud yesterday. These things say so much more than words.

Mark Van Doren, when he was here, said, "The birds don't know they have names."

Watching them I thought: who cares what they are called? But do I have the courage not to care? Why not be like Adam, in a new world of my own, and call them by my own names?

That would still mean that I thought the names were important.

No name and no word to identify the beauty and reality of those birds today is the gift of God to me in letting me see them.

(And that name--God--is not a name! It is like a letter X or Y. Yahweh is a better name--it finally means Nameless One.)

October 5, 1957, III.123-24

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 1

The Mystical Body of Friends

These are the most beautiful days of the year, except for days in May.

Sun every day now, and very bright sky, clear, dark blue. The leaves of the trees change, though not all change into bright colors, as in the North. The sweet gums do well, though--there are some small ones coming up in the novitiate woods. Some good poplars in the wood of the former pig lot are clearing (thinning out) along the Bardstown road.

Then on Friday Mark Van Doren's autobiography came and I have begun it, getting with him as far now as the army in World War I and the Negroes. The world of Illinois and his childhood is very much the same as the world all around us, and yet I suddenly find it hard to believe in such peace and security.

Thursday afternoon Reverend Father gave me a letter from Boris Pasternak. The letter was brief but cordial and confirmed my intuition of the deep and fundamental understanding that exists between us. And this is the thing I have been growing to see is most important. Everything hangs on the possibility of such understanding, which forms our interior bond, which is the only basis of true peace and community. External, juridical, doctrinal, etc., bonds can never achieve this. And this bond exists between me and countless people like Pasternak everywhere in the world (genuine people like Pasternak are never "countless"), and my vocation is intimately bound up with this bond and this understanding, for the sake of which also I have to be solitary and not waste my spirit in pretenses that do not come anywhere near this reality or have anything to do with it.

October 12, 1958, III.223-24