Word: merton
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NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell American Dreams: Lost and Found, Studs Terkel ∙ Lyndon, Merle Miller Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong ∙ Naming Names, Victor Navasky ∙ The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers
That freedom could be savored for only a moment. After a journey to meet with Asian mystics in India and Ceylon, death came in Bangkok, where Merton, padding about in his room, was electrocuted by a faulty fan. The words- and they were a torrent within that vow of silence - are undying...
...childhood restlessness plagued Merton through school in France and in Britain, where he entered Cambridge. His first year there was his last. He spent too many nights in beds other than his own, and fathered an illegitimate child. His furious guardian, a family friend, dealt with the indiscretion. But when Merton left for a visit to the U.S. the next summer, the guardian wrote to suggest that Thomas stay there. (The young woman and her son died in a London air raid early in World War II.) The Seven Storey Mountain was so circumspect about Merton's youthful sins...
...Merton emerged from his crises disillusioned but stronger. His devotion to God, the Virgin Mary, the fruits of contemplation remained intact. His questioning of institutions increased. Though he kept his own will in check, he doubted a system that "constantly organized and marshaled [the young ones] this way and that." In his 1951 spiritual treatise, The Ascent to Truth, Merton had ingenuously defended the churchmen who silenced Galileo, and he had counseled other pioneers to be patient with ecclesiastical censors. Now he sharply questioned such blind obedience...
...Gethsemani, Merton was given permission to build a modest, cinder-block hermitage in which to write and pray, and to receive a mounting stream of visitors. His message journeyed far beyond the confines of the retreat into a world with which he was finally at ease. The perduring cause was peace - a cause he had first championed in his days at Columbia in the 1930s: peace among races, peace in Viet Nam, peace between the superpowers who were to decide the fate of billions of souls. The irksome discipline of the monastery, Furlong concludes, had given him the freedom...