A Year With Thomas Merton - October 20

Going Beyond My Boundaries

A wonderful letter from Pasternak to Kurt Wolff, in German, was forwarded to me from Pantheon. Most of it concerned with his reaction to my letters and to my "perfect" understanding of all that was most important to him in his work. "The aptness of his understanding and the clarity of his insights is beyond belief." And he picked out especially my reaction to his Hamlet poem and the business about the Red Sea and the Blessed Virgin, and about God-manhood.

That I have been able to give the consolation of understanding and appreciating what he most wanted to say is also to me a great consolation.

Later in the letter, a most important point, and one which came back to me this morning after my Mass:

"One cannot remain immobile where the political and aesthetic customs and potentialities are so conspicuous and compelling: one must take another step."

I agree with this perfectly, and I see that this is the very heart of my own personal vocation.

I must--in my writing, in my prayer, in my life--take this further step and go beyond my limitations and the limitations of thought, art and religion of our time. And this requires effort and suffering. I simply cannot sit down and accept my limitations--that is impossible. But I must take care most of all not to be content with merely fanciful transcendence--going beyond my limitations in thought and imagination only. It must be a real transcendence.

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 2

Dialogue in the Kingdom of God

Two letters have arrived from Pasternak. My letter and "Prometheus" got through to him and apparently quite easily. He commented on "Prometheus," saying that he liked especially section IV and VII, and that the last had some "fine individual Christosophic touches." I was very pleased. Will write to him again. He keeps insisting that his early work is "worthless." His heart is evidently in Doctor Zhivago, to which he does not refer by the full name. Only as "Dr Zh" or "the book published by Pantheon."

Talking to Frater Lawrence about it, I remarked on the strange and marvelous fact of this apparently easy and natural communication between a monk in a strictly guarded Trappist monastery and a suspect poet behind the Iron Curtain. I am in closer contact with Pasternak than I am with people in Louisville or Bardstown or even in my own monastery--and have more in common with him.

And all this while our two countries, deeply hostile to one another, have nothing to communicate between themselves--and yet spend millions trying to communicate with the moon!

The simple and human dialogue with Pasternak and a few others like him is to me worth thousands of sermons and radio speeches. It is to me the true Kingdom of God, which is still so clearly, and evidently, "in the midst of us."

October 18, 1958, III.224

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

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 26

Writing to Think and Live and Pray

It is a bright afternoon: what am I going to do? I am going to work with my mind and with my pen, while the sky is clear, and while the soft white clouds are small and sharply defined in it. I am not going to bury myself in books and note-taking. I am not going to lose myself in this jungle and come out drunk and bewildered, feeling that bewilderment is a sign that I have done something. I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, and because for me to write is to think and live and also, in some degree, even to pray.

This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.

But for this afternoon to be my own in eternity, it must be my own this afternoon, and I must possess myself in it, not be possessed by books and by ideas not my own, and by a compulsion to produce what nobody needs. But simply to glorify God by accepting His gift and His work. To work for Him is to work that I myself may live.

How else shall I study Boris Pasternak, whose central idea is the sacredness of life?

September 27, 1958, III.219