Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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However, in this collection the contradictions between nature and civilization, freedom and social structures are still present in some of the poems. There is a strong criticism of the bad and dangerous working conditions of employees in the technological age, as well as a depiction of the chaotic life in the metropolis, where the identities of the inhabitants have been distorted by consumerist mirages:

Everywhere there is optimism without love

And pessimism without understanding.

They who have new clothes and smell of haircuts

Cannot agree to be at peace

With their own images, shadowing them in windows

From store to store.²⁸

Although this dualistic attitude is still accompanied by a condemnation of the vanities and absurdities of the world, nevertheless, in this collection, unlike in previous books, Merton does not try to evade or deny it. On the contrary, he tries to redeem and transform it, moved as he was by a great compassion which might have been motivated by his approach at that time to the Oriental religions, most particularly to Zen Buddhism. His poem “Elias–Variation on a Theme” is precisely a meditation on his double vocation, the contemplative one and the active one, as well as an attempt to reconcile two apparently opposed inner tendencies: on the one hand, his need for contemplative solitude; and on the other hand, the urge to a revolutionary action in the midst of an individualistic divided world. From this lyrical piece, one can deduce that he conceived solitude not as sterile self-isolation but as a path to real communion. As he would write some years later, during the sixties, “the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself. He forgets that there is number in order to become all […] He is attuned to all the Hearing in the world, since he lives in silence.”²⁹