**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Thomas Merton|Thomas Merton]] # Book Overview ![[Dancing in the Water of Life Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Author Thomas Merton (1915--1968) was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, one of the most influential spiritual writers of the twentieth century. He entered the monastery in 1941 and became widely known through his autobiography *The Seven Storey Mountain* (1948). Over the following decades he produced an enormous body of work spanning contemplative theology, poetry, social criticism, and interfaith dialogue. By the time of these journals (1963--1965), Merton had been a monk for over twenty years, served as Novice Master, and was deeply engaged with existentialist philosophy, Zen Buddhism, civil rights, and the nuclear arms question -- all while seeking permission to live as a hermit within the monastic structure. This volume was edited by Robert E. Daggy from Merton's private journals and published posthumously as Volume 5 of the complete journals. ## Central Thesis This isn't a book with a thesis in the conventional sense -- it's a private journal. But the gravitational center is Merton's slow, contested movement toward full-time solitary life in the hermitage on Mount Olivet. The journal tracks his progression from part-time solitary (stealing hours at the hermitage between monastic duties) to official hermit (August 20, 1965). What makes it compelling is how thoroughly the journal demolishes any romantic notion of this transition. Merton doesn't arrive at solitude and find peace. He arrives at solitude and finds himself -- restless, contradictory, physically deteriorating, intellectually ravenous, oscillating between genuine contemplative depth and what he calls "mental gavottes." The real subject is the absurdity of seeking peace while remaining fundamentally unpeaceful, and the slow recognition that the hermitage can't solve what the monastery couldn't. ## Why This Book Matters Merton's journals are the most honest spiritual writing of the twentieth century, and this volume may be the most revealing of the seven. It covers a period of genuine crisis -- personal, physical, ecclesial, and political. The Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, Vatican II, the death of the Abbot General, Merton's chronic physical ailments, his frustrations with Dom James and monastic bureaucracy -- all collide with his deepest aspirations toward contemplative silence. For anyone interested in what a serious spiritual life actually looks like (as opposed to what it looks like in hagiography), this journal is essential. It shows that depth doesn't come from resolving contradictions but from living honestly inside them. --- # Chapter Summaries Since this is a journal rather than a structured book, these summaries follow the five parts that editor Robert E. Daggy organized the material into, corresponding to major periods and themes. ## Part I: Living as a Part-time Solitary (August 1963 -- June 1964) The longest section covers Merton's life split between the monastery and the hermitage. He's Novice Master, engaged with visitors, publishing, correspondence -- and simultaneously trying to deepen his contemplative practice. Key events include his hospitalization for a cervical disk injury (September 1963), the Kennedy assassination (November 1963), the death of Abbot General Dom Gabriel Sortais, and the election of Dom Ignace Gillet as the new General. Intellectually this is a period of extraordinary range: Merton is reading St. Anselm, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bultmann, Karl Barth, Simone de Beauvoir, Frithjof Schuon on Islam, Sufi saints, the Desert Fathers, and Walker Percy -- often on the same day. He compares Anselm's concept of freedom with Sartre's, reads Barth's *Dogmatics in Outline* with growing admiration, and discovers Merleau-Ponty as a philosopher whose phenomenology aligns with his own Zen-inflected contemplative instincts. He writes prolifically even as he questions whether a solitary should write at all. ## Part II: The Suzuki Visit (June 1964) A brief section covering Merton's trip to New York to meet D. T. Suzuki, the great Zen scholar. This is one of the few occasions Merton left the monastery grounds during this period, and the meeting held deep significance for his interfaith commitments and his understanding of contemplative consciousness across traditions. ## Part III: The Joy and Absurdity of Increasing Solitude (June 1964 -- April 1965) Merton spends increasing time at the hermitage as Dom James gradually extends his permissions. The "joy and absurdity" of the section title captures the dual register perfectly. He loves the hermitage, the weather, the deer, the birds, the silence. He also can't stop producing work, engaging with visitors, and churning through correspondence. Physical ailments persist -- arthritis, dermatitis, chronic sinusitis, spinal problems, digestive troubles. He scouts Edelin's Hollow as a possible new hermitage site, drawn to an old ruined dance hall near where people once gathered to drink. The pattern of dissatisfaction -- finding the grass always greener -- is one he recognizes in himself but can't seem to break. ## Part IV: Day of a Stranger (Sometime in May 1965) An inserted essay, the original and shorter version of what became one of Merton's most celebrated pieces. Written as a journal-like description of a typical day in his life, requested by a Latin American editor. The version here is rawer and angrier than the published one -- a portrait of the hermit life that refuses to sentimentalize it, and that locates the hermit firmly within the absurdities of the Cold War world (SAC bombers flying over the hermitage). ## Part V: "Hermit in the Water of Life" (May 1965 -- December 1965) The culmination. Merton is replaced as Novice Master and begins full-time hermit life on August 20, 1965. The hermitage gets electricity, a bathroom is planned, a well is dug. But the inner restlessness continues. He catalogues his physical ailments in devastating detail. He reads voraciously. He writes. He watches the weather. By December 1965 he reaches something like acceptance -- not resolution, but a willingness to inhabit the life he has without requiring it to be something else. The journal ends with him confronting a snapshot of himself at twenty-two, wishing for that body back, and immediately recognizing the wish as absurd. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## The Absurdity of Everything "Absurd" is the word that recurs most insistently throughout the journal. Merton finds the liturgy absurd, his own writing projects absurd, the Vietnam War absurd, the idea of a hermit being "accountable" absurd, and most of all, himself absurd. The introduction frames this through a Lear limerick about an old man dancing a quadrille with a raven -- Merton as the man performing cerebral gavottes with his own contradictions, unable to stop the dance even as external forces try to smash him. This isn't nihilistic absurdity. It's the absurdity of a person who sees himself clearly and can't change what he sees. ## Intellectual Range as Spiritual Practice Merton's reading during this period is staggering. In a single week he might move from St. Anselm's *De Casu Diaboli* to Sartre's *Baudelaire* to Merleau-Ponty's *Signes* to Bultmann's *Essays* to a Sufi biography to Edmund Wilson on the Iroquois. This isn't dilettantism -- or rather, he worries constantly that it is, but the journal shows how each text feeds into his contemplative process. He calls it *lectio* and says it "situates" him. The comparison of Anselm's concept of freedom with Sartre's existentialist liberty is one of the most intellectually ambitious passages in his journals. ## Physical Suffering and "Growing Old" Merton was fifty during this period, and he felt ancient. The journal is punctuated by pain: his cervical disk, arthritic hip, chronic dermatitis, bleeding, sinusitis, numbness in his hands, lost teeth, lost hair. His family died young -- father at forty-four, mother at thirty-four, brother at twenty-five. He records the pain matter-of-factly, but it colors everything. The hermitage life he'd dreamed of for decades arrives just as his body becomes difficult to live in. ## The Hermitage as Non-Solution The most striking theme is how the hermitage fails to deliver what Merton expected. He'd badgered Dom James for years about becoming a hermit. He finally gets it. And then: he can't see to read, has to carry water, fears snakes in the outhouse, dreams about moving to Edelin's Hollow, and discovers that solitude doesn't cure inner restlessness. This isn't disillusionment -- Merton genuinely loves the hermitage and its surroundings. It's something more honest: the recognition that no external arrangement can resolve the contradictions that are constitutive of being human. ## Engagement with the World For a hermit, Merton is startlingly engaged. He writes about the Kennedy assassination, the Birmingham church bombing, the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons policy, the French nuclear deterrent, Vatican II, the civil rights movement, and the political situation in Cuba, South Vietnam, and Panama. He reads newspapers, receives visitors (including one memorable and harrowing encounter with a disturbed woman), and maintains a massive correspondence. The tension between withdrawal and engagement is never resolved, and Merton doesn't pretend otherwise. ## Dom James and Monastic Authority The friction with Abbot Dom James Fox runs through the journal as a persistent irritant. Merton describes him as a businessman disguised in monastic garb, an authoritarian who "has got everything screwed down so tight that nothing can happen." The frustration is institutional as much as personal -- Merton chafes against the censorship system, the liturgical pomposity, the resistance to eremitic life. At the same time, he recognizes that his assessments are colored by his own resentments, and he periodically catches himself and pulls back from judgment. --- # Analytical Reading ## Main Arguments Since this is a journal rather than an argument, what follows are the central claims that emerge from Merton's sustained self-examination: 1. Solitude, genuinely pursued, doesn't produce peace but a clearer encounter with one's own contradictions. 2. Contemplative life and intellectual engagement aren't opposed -- reading and writing are forms of *lectio* that "situate" the monk in reality. 3. Monastic institutions can become obstacles to the very life they're designed to support, through rigidity, bureaucracy, and authoritarian leadership. 4. The distinction between interior and exterior life is a false dichotomy -- as Merleau-Ponty puts it, "the interior and the exterior are inseparable." 5. The word "absurd" is not a dismissal but a mode of honest description -- an acknowledgment that human life resists the patterns we impose on it. 6. Physical suffering and bodily deterioration are inseparable from spiritual experience, not incidental to it. 7. Existentialist philosophy (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger) and contemplative theology (Anselm, the Desert Fathers, Zen) address the same fundamental questions about freedom, authenticity, and the self. 8. A serious Christian life in the modern world requires engagement with that world's crises -- racial injustice, nuclear war, political corruption -- not retreat from them. 9. The search for the "right" place, the "right" conditions for spiritual life is itself a form of evasion. What matters is accepting where you are. ## Methodology This is a private journal, written without a reader in mind (though Merton was always at least half-aware of eventual publication). The method is daily observation and reflection -- weather, reading, visitors, monastic events, dreams, physical symptoms, political news -- layered over sustained philosophical and theological inquiry. Merton rarely argues systematically. He circles, reconsiders, contradicts himself, and returns to the same questions from different angles. The journal functions as what he calls a tool to keep himself "honestly situated." ## Strengths The journal's power is in its honesty. Merton doesn't edit out the petty irritations, the vanity, the physical complaints, the intellectual showing off, or the moments of genuine despair. The result is a portrait of spiritual life that feels real in ways that formal spiritual writing almost never does. His ability to hold together radically different intellectual traditions -- Anselm and Sartre, Barth and Zen, Bultmann and Sufi mysticism -- without forcing them into a false synthesis is remarkable. The prose itself is excellent: precise, varied, capable of moving from theological analysis to weather description to political commentary within a single entry. ## Limitations The journal can feel repetitive -- the same frustrations with Dom James, the same oscillation between enthusiasm and despair, the same self-criticism for the same faults. Merton's political commentary, while brave for a cloistered monk, sometimes lacks the nuance of his theological and philosophical reflections. His treatment of the woman who visited the monastery (November 20, 1963) is uncomfortable to read, though its discomfort is at least honest. The sheer volume of reading references can be overwhelming -- Merton drops dozens of names and titles in rapid succession, and without the footnotes a reader would be lost. The journal assumes a reader who shares (or is willing to acquire) a vast frame of reference. --- # Personal Reflection ## Key Takeaways The most valuable thing in this journal is the demolition of the idea that spiritual progress means arriving somewhere. Merton got what he wanted -- the hermitage, the solitude, the freedom from institutional roles -- and it didn't solve anything. Not because solitude is worthless, but because the person who enters solitude brings himself along. This is obvious when stated, but watching it unfold day by day in Merton's own voice is something else entirely. The intellectual range is also instructive. Merton treats reading as a spiritual practice, not a distraction from one. His ability to move between Anselm and Sartre, between Bultmann and Zen, isn't eclecticism -- it's a genuine attempt to find truth wherever it shows up. His comparison of Anselm's *rectitudo* with Sartre's concept of authentic freedom is a model for what serious interfaith and inter-disciplinary thinking looks like. The journal is also a masterclass in honest self-observation. Merton catches himself performing, seeking approval, justifying his own triviality, and he records these moments without either excusing them or dramatizing them. He's not a saint in these pages. He's a person trying to be honest about what it's like to be a person. ## Questions Raised - Can solitude function as a genuine spiritual path when the person pursuing it is as socially and intellectually engaged as Merton? Or does it become a kind of theater? - What's the relationship between physical suffering and contemplative insight? Merton's chronic pain clearly shapes his spiritual experience, but he never theorizes this relationship explicitly. - How much of Merton's frustration with Dom James is legitimate critique and how much is projection? The journal gives both readings and doesn't resolve the question. - Is Merton's intellectual range a form of spiritual depth or a form of avoidance? He asks this question of himself repeatedly without settling it. - What would Merton's hermit life have looked like if he'd been healthy? The physical ailments so thoroughly permeate this period that it's hard to separate the spiritual experience from the bodily one. ## Connections to Other Works - [[The Seven Storey Mountain]] -- Merton's autobiography, written twenty years before these journals, presents a dramatically different Merton: confident, converting, arriving. This journal is its dark mirror. - [[New Seeds of Contemplation]] -- Merton's mature theological work, which presents in polished form many ideas that appear here in raw, questioning draft. - [[Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander]] -- A curated selection from these and other journals, published during Merton's lifetime. Comparing the two shows what Merton chose to make public and what he kept private. - [[Walden]] by Henry David Thoreau -- The American precedent for the writer-hermit, though Thoreau's solitude was far more performative and far less tortured than Merton's. - [[The Journals of Kierkegaard]] -- A closer parallel: the philosopher-theologian using the journal form to work through existential and religious questions he can't resolve in formal writing. - [[Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind]] by Shunryu Suzuki -- The Zen perspective that Merton was drawing toward during this period, particularly the dissolution of the interior/exterior distinction. --- # Reading Notes - The Lear limerick framing in the introduction is one of the best editorial decisions in the series. The image of Merton dancing a quadrille with a raven captures the whole journal's energy. - Merton's comparison of Anselm and Sartre on freedom is genuinely original philosophy, buried in a private journal entry. The claim that both seek to transcend mere choice of predetermined objects is a real insight. - The Kennedy assassination entries are among the most affecting in the journal -- not for their political analysis, which is fairly standard, but for the way Merton registers the event as a monk receiving information in fragments from other monks who heard it on the phone. - The catalogue of physical ailments near the end of the journal is devastating: arthritic hip, chronic dermatitis, sinusitis, lung shadows, diarrhea, lost teeth, lost hair, damaged vertebrae. He was fifty. - Merton's discovery of Bultmann is one of the great intellectual encounters in the journal. His response is almost ecstatic: "every sentence stops me and I don't seem to get anywhere." - The weather descriptions deserve attention. Merton uses weather the way a novelist uses setting -- it's never merely informational. "Cold stars. Steam coming up in the dark from the kitchens into the freezing night" is writing of the first order. - His self-diagnosis is precise: "my ailment is this: I become anxious to keep up with all that is being said and done, and I want in my turn to be 'in there'...to play my own part." This from a man about to become a hermit. - The encounter with the disturbed woman visitor (November 20, 1963) is jarring in context -- a reminder that the monastery wall is permeable, and that Merton's carefully maintained solitude is always contingent. - Merleau-Ponty's line "I am to myself as being in the world" prompts one of Merton's most self-aware passages. He realizes it's the exact opposite of what he's been saying for twenty years, and then agrees with it. - The infirmary Mass description -- Father Stephen grappling with the altar, deaf Brother Leo shouting responses in his own language, Brother John in a wheelchair with a red blanket -- is one of the most humanly vivid passages in all of Merton's writing.