Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
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2010 - Monastic Observances
2012 - The Life of the Vows
2014 - Thoughts in Solitude and New Seeds of Contemplation - audio books; Seven Storey Mountain, Centenary Edition
2015 - Ishi Means Man; What Are These Wounds; Exiles Ends in Glory
1 Source: “Merton Center web site: http://merton.org/chrono.aspx. Used with permission.”
Chapter 1
Thomas Merton’s Poetic Evolution
from World’s Denial to an Experience of Universal Love1
Geography comes to an end
Compass has lost all earthly north
Horizons have no meaning
Nor roads an explanation.2
These intriguing apocalyptic lines from Merton’s Early Poems (1940-1942) could well summarise his vision of the secular world at the time he entered the monastery of Gethsemani in 1941. They depict a kind of waste land, a barren scenery where people have lost the capacity to interpret their own existence, and stand as a good testimony of the need to give a new shape to experience.
It is precisely this urgency for creating new maps, new cartographies, new dwellings, and most particularly, for a radical transformation of human consciousness that is the main force which might have led Merton to choose the silent life and write a very fertile poetic work by means of which he tried to give birth to a novel geography: the geography of the Spirit.