A Year With Thomas Merton - April 11

My Art of Confession and Witness

The work of writing can be for me, or very close to, the simple job of being: by creative reflection and awareness to help life itself live in me, to give its esse an existent, or to find a place, rather, in esse by action, intelligence, and love. For to write is to love: it is to inquire and to praise, to confess and to appeal. This testimony of love remains necessary. Not to reassure myself that I am ("I write, therefore I am"), but simply to pay my debt to life, to the world, to other men. To speak out with an open heart and say what seems to me to have meaning. The bad writing I have done has all been authoritarian, the declaration of musts, and the announcement of punishments. Bad because it implies a lack of love, good insofar as there may yet have been some love in it. The best stuff has been more straight confession and witness.

April 14, 1966, VI.371

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 11

On Leaving my Hermitage

What business have I to be sitting around in Jim Wygal’s house in Anchorage, listening to records, trying to talk about something? I don’t belong in that anymore, still less in the place where I went with Fr. John Loftus and his friend the other night to hear some jazz. At least I have found out by experience that this just does not go. I am dead to it; it is finished long ago. You don’t drag a corpse down to Fourth Street and set it up in a chair, at a table, and in polite society.

This just made the reading of Chuang Tzu all the better and more meaningful. Here at the hermitage I am not dead, because this is my life, and I am awake, and breathing, and listening with all that I have got, and sinking to the root. There is no question that I am completely committed to interior solitude. Where—makes no difference. Not a question of “where.” Not “tampering with my heart,” or with the hearts of others. This is imperative. “The mind is a menace to wisdom.” To be one who “though walking on dry land, is as though he were at the bottom of a pool.”

The trouble is this being a “writer,” and one of the most absurd things I have gotten into is this business of dialogues and retreats. This has to be faced. I can’t completely back out now, but certainly no more pushing.

If the days in solitude have taught me this, they are good enough.

July 4, 1960, IV.18