A search for solitude

By 1952, Thomas Merton's renown as the bestselling author of The Seven Storey Mountain was well established. During the years illuminated by this third volume of his private journals, Merton struggled to reconcile his celebrity with his desire for a life of hermetic silence and contemplation.

Already at the Abbey of Gethsemani for over a decade, Merton was beginning to grow impatient with the strictures and shortcomings of conventional monastic life. Here he chronicles the search for a more authentic experience of the divine and of community that led him to explore Zen, existentialism, and the exciting developments in Latin American Christianity and literature, which informed his own Catholic spirituality and his views of the great intellectual debates of his time. Merton's private writing combines a poet's eye for the beauty of nature - in the woods and fields of the Abbey - as well as a fiction writer's instinct for the idiosyncracies of his brethren, the rhythms and tediums of regular observance, the strengths of the monastery and its weaknesses. It is, however, Merton's restless, compelling, unvarnished reflections on the question of what it means to be a monk in his own time that gives this journal its most lasting value, paying homage to monasticism and instructing all who value the contemplative life.