Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton

The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things.  In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things.  And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor for shame.  It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love.  The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

I took a trip to Kentucky last week.  We drove only a few minutes past the monastery where Thomas Merton, surely the most famous American monastic, lived for most of his life, and where he wrote Thoughts in Solitude.  It was easy, rising early as we did, to understand the attraction of solitude in the landscape of the Bluegrass region of Kentucky: the mist rising on rolling hills, the frost on grass like glass, etc., etc.

But my impressions, tied as they are to place and time, are really a kind of lie: Merton's solitude is as achievable, and as difficult, in the city as well as the country or the desert.  It's a kind of way of being, an accommodation with the creation that is the self, and therefore with a manifestation of God.  Because we are "a transient expression of Your inexhaustible and eternal reality," we know God by better knowing ourselves.

Merton's meditations on solitude and the spirit probably won't interest non-spiritual people.  They might, as I was, be interested in Merton because of the obsession of Ethan Hawke's beleaguered priest in last year's First Reformed.  (That guy ought to remember that Merton advises, "The God of peace is never glorified by violence.")  Skeptics might be surprised by Merton's version of monasticism, which is really nothing like the flight from the world that the non-spiritual imagine it to be.  One of Merton's themes, in facts, is that a spiritual life must recognize the essential totality of an individual, that because we are fully human we must turn to God with our whole selves: social, professional, all of it.  He certainly wouldn't recommend a monk's life to most.  But his version of solitude is more than a turning away from others; it's a kind of complete attention to the self that directs to God.

The prose style of Thoughts in Solitude seems like something a monk might produce: clear, strong, but also abstract, developed with a slow care that seems like it could only be achieved where the writer has the luxury to devote his entire attention to every word.  You can tell that Merton has taken to heart his own advice about books:

Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in.  They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence.  They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them.  They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again.  They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.

There's an impeccable wisdom in that.  It feels true.  It feels, also, inexplicable, as if to say anything else would obviate the ability of Merton's words to "bring us light and peace and fill us with silence."  So I won't say any more.