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

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Merton’s concerns with violence and war, with racism, with cruelty went far beyond the protests of his day because he saw very clearly from his background of daily worship in the monastery that anyone looking at the world had to ask deeper and more challenging questions. As he is quoted in one of the essays in this book: “A society that kills real men in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love.” Merton’s conclusion that the world is driven by insane reasoning, by obvious contradictions that seem to arouse no concern, and is fueled by desires for vengeance on other people who are different, resonates with greater power every year as we continue to amass weapons, despoil the planet and associate our over–consumption with our rights as free individuals. It is this that informs these essays, lies behind them and gives them their depth and meaning. Their author’s reaction to our world condition is not simply to point out its lies, as Merton did, but to follow him in seeking for seeds of hope, newness and change. She finds these in part in a search for ways to recast and revitalize language and to then go further and to put forward new interpretations which come from the freedom won by bringing words back to life. The essays illustrate the process.