![]() ![]() He ends the book with the line Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: “Here ends the book, but not the searching.”įrom The Seven Storey Mountain : “It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago.People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. It’s been compared to the Confessions of St. ![]() He’s perhaps best known for his spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). In 1961, Merton wrote, “It is possible to doubt whether I have become a monk (a doubt that I have to live with), but it is not possible to doubt that I am a writer, that I was born one and will most probably die as one.” Over the course of his life, Merton wrote more than 70 books, 2,000 poems, and numerous essays and lectures. He began by translating religious texts and writing biographies of the saints. His superior at the monastery, Father Abbot Dom Frederic Dunne, noticed his talent for writing and encouraged him to continue. He continued studying, and kept journals full of his questions and musings. On December 10, 1941, he quit his job and entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, to begin his life as a Trappist monk. Bonaventure College, but he continued studying Catholicism, and the spiritualism of William Blake. Merton converted to Catholicism in 1938, while he was a student at Columbia University. Merton’s mother died of stomach cancer when he was six years old 10 years later, his father died of a brain tumor. They were both artists, and they met at an art school in Paris. His mother was an American, and his father was from New Zealand. Today is the birthday of Thomas Merton, born in Prades, France (1915). ![]() The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.” It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it. Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I would hardly remember what I had written the day before. She would type it for me and the next day I would go over it. (But for a refrigerator!) I wrote longhand with a pencil and I gave it to my assistant, Judith McNally. If that’s not good enough, you build a fence around the fence. There’s an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. I was like a draft horse with a conditioned reflex. The only thing I ever did there was work. ![]() He said: “I used to have a little studio in Brooklyn, a couple of blocks from my house - no telephone, not much else. He wrote by hand - he usually wrote in the morning and then typed it up in the afternoon, or gave it to an assistant to type. He went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes: for The Armies of the Night (1968) and for his nonfiction novel The Executioner’s Song (1979). It was The Naked and the Dead (1948), and it became the definitive literary novel about World War II, and made Norman Mailer famous at the age of 25. After his discharge, he moved to New York City and spent 15 months writing a novel about the war. He was studying engineering at Harvard when he was drafted into the Army in 1944. It’s the birthday of Norman Mailer, born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). “ A Time to Talk ” by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost. ![]()
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