Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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This afternoon, let me
Be a sad person. Am I not
Permitted (like other men)
To be sick of myself? [… ]
Do not forbid me (once again) to be
Angry, bitter, disillusioned,
Wishing I could die.9
If there is something we can learn from Merton it is that I am not the one I think I am. On the contrary, he helps us understand that – like the prophet Jonas – I live in the belly of a paradox, that there is not only “one” but at least “two” within myself, and that my real person carries an eternal war between what I am supposed to be and what I really am. This is a perpetual agony, a war without end which – in the case of Merton – was manifested in a ferocious struggle between his religious call to the contemplative life and his unquestionable vocation to become a writer. Nevertheless, he did not hide this contradiction but learnt to breathe through his wound, accepting his destiny as one of the greatest poet–prophets of the twentieth century, whose word fiercely denounces all the horrors of human history but also sets up a new beginning through art and symbolic imagination.10 As he himself recognizes in one of his literary essays: