Patrick Hart

I picked this up while my husband and I were on retreat at a Trappist monastery. I blazed through it. I'd never read Merton, and I wanted to stop to contemplate his insights, but he gave me something I seemed to be starving for, so I gobbled it up. I was greedy and obsessive. Vol. 1 covers the years 1939-1941, just before he became a monk. The final entry is dated two days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He writes about the war in Europe from the perspective of a draft-age man living through it day-to-day, reacting to the headlines, speculating about Roosevelt’s intentions. This immediacy will be irresistible for anyone who loves history. As a grad student living in Greenwich Village, Merton taught at Columbia University. He was a poet and novelist (unpublished at the time), so this volume includes candid responses to rejection letters from New York publishers. The New Yorker magazine rejected one of his poems because it was “a parody of Emily Dickinson,” and since New Yorker readers didn’t read Dickinson, they wouldn’t understand the connection. Merton protests in a journal entry. “I never read a line of Emily Dickinson.” Writers, take heart … you’re in excellent company. I was struck by Merton’s absolute visceral knowledge of God’s love … as well as the deep insights he had even in his twenties. His writing caused me to have a couple of epiphanies about my own life and faith. At 500 pages, it’s an enormous book, (and only the first of seven volumes) but down to earth, funny, inspiring. I found it transformative. I’m going to jump right in to Volume 2.… (meer)

Thomas Merton wrote the clearest, most sincere, important works of Christian spirituality of the 20th century. This is the first of his lengthy series of journals (of which dozens are published.) This is definitely early Merton: opinionated in literature, conflicted about his future, and deep in study of Catholic theology and saints. Intelligent and honest analysis of the world that, though it was written at the onset of WWII, doesn't feel outdated because Merton's focus is on the underlying causes in the world, rather than the events themselves.… (meer)