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

7 страница из 65

This book aims to bring together a series of critical essays on Thomas Merton’s poetry, which clearly shows how the quest for self–detachment and mystical communion with the divine is indeed at the center of Merton’s spirituality and political concerns. Together with a chronology of Merton’s life and works and two interviews with Dr George Kilcourse and Paul Quenon, ocso, the volume contains some of the most relevant papers I have delivered in different national and international conferences both in Spain and in the UK over more than a decade. They have all been published in specialized journals relating to the fields of Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and Translation and they can be considered as vivid testimonies to Merton’s perception of human egocentrism as the main root of all international confrontations and social violence:

We live in an age of bad dreams, in which the scientist and engineer possess the power to give external form to the phantasms of man’s unconscious. The bright weapons that sing in the atmosphere, ready to pulverize the cities of the world, are the dreams of giants without a center […] One is permitted to wish their dreams had been less sordid.³