Last month, Katie and I spent a wonderful few days at Laity Lodge. There’s so much that could be said about our time there, but for now, I’ll just say this. Our cantilevered room opened out over the Frio River. In the mornings (and just about every afternoon) I’d stand on the balcony and take pictures. Each time I stopped to look at it, the river had taken on a whole new personality: different kinds of reflections, different degrees of opacity, different shades of green.
“This is an interesting planet,” writes Marilynne Robinson. “It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
She’s right. It’s true of rivers and trees, deserts and mountains, big cities and small towns. It’s true of penguins and people and pigs. It’s an interesting planet, entrusted to our care.
What I’ve Read Recently
Speaking of Marilynne Robinson, I recently read her very first novel, Housekeeping (Picador), published way back in 1980. This one, I’ve got to say, is lower-tier Robinson for me—a distinction admittedly as ridiculous as ranking the works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Scorsese. (It’s all good—unless, of course, it’s great.)
In my experience, one doesn’t read Robinson’s fiction first of all for plot. These are not books to figure out; you’re not waiting on the edge of your seat for the next big reveal. Instead, these are stories to let wash over you. Or better yet, stories in which to soak.
Here in Housekeeping, we catch early glimpses of what would become Robinson’s trademark prose, a style she had pretty well perfected with the publication of Gilead 24 years later.
One such glimpse: “For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
What indeed.
What I’m Reading Now
For reasons I cannot fully ascertain, I’ve been slow to get into Thomas Merton. As in: it just hasn’t happened for me yet. Once, in my early years of literary exploration, I picked up The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s a book People Like Me are supposed to have read; I was aware of this. But I couldn’t get past the first few pages before setting it aside. At some point, I must have given my copy away.
Several years ago, I gave Merton another try with The Wisdom of the Desert. (It wasn’t bad, though in that particular genre I’d heartily recommend this book first.) I also read Robert Hudson’s strange and wonderful The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966. It was easily one of my favorite books of 2018—I think about it still—but that affection has more to do with Hudson and Dylan than with Merton, I’m sorry to say.
It’s possible my puzzling disinterest in everyone’s favorite Trappist monk has something to do with Merton’s later flirtations with Zen Buddhism, an approach to life that, generally speaking and with all due respect, leaves me cold. But there’s more to Merton than that—so much writing and living came before—and I’m not quite ready to give up on getting to know him.
Which brings me to Sophfronia Scott and her book The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton (Broadleaf). Scott is perhaps an unlikely “friend” to Merton. A Black female Protestant mainliner with Baptist roots, it’s not immediately apparent what she would have in common with this French-born son of a Kiwi who cavorted through his younger years before converting to Catholicism and becoming a monk. Besides the biographical differences, there are the equally important temperamental ones. If they were to meet at a cocktail party, Scott muses, “I’d probably find Merton boisterous and slightly boorish. Later, I’d likely describe him to friends as having that entitled, mansplaining kind of tone that makes you keep your distance.”
And yet, Scott tells us that at a certain point she found herself thinking about Merton all the time. “I just have this monk who follows me around,” she recalls telling an audience at a writing conference in Grand Rapids. “And he kind of mentors me and gives me advice.”
The Seeker and the Monk is conceived as a “conversation” between Scott and Merton, with chapters covering a range of themes that appear in Merton’s private journals. By focusing on these journals as opposed to his more popular books, Scott helps us get to know Merton the man, unfiltered and unedited.
Want an example? There’s a famous passage in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (a marvelous title for a book, if you ask me) in which Merton recounts a street-corner epiphany that marked a turning point in his life. In that moment in downtown Louisville, this monk who had so publicly withdrawn from the world was suddenly overcome by the recognition “that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” So significant was this mystical experience in Merton’s life—and, later, in the imaginations of his readers—that if you visit that street corner today, you will find a historical marker.
One year after the epiphany, though, Merton returned to Louisville and had a very different experience. “Hated the town. It was hot and stupid,” he writes in his journal. “Everywhere the world oppresses me with a sense of infinite clutter and confusion…”
It’s a jarring reversal. But as Scott reminds us, it’s also an understandable one—if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about our own complexities and contradictions. Merton’s epiphany came at a particular moment in time. I don’t doubt the experience was spiritually significant, and he certainly carried that sense with him. But life didn’t permit him to remain there on that street corner forever. Nor, certainly, did he remain as grumpy as the journal would find him, back in Louisville the following year. That too was a moment in time.
Our spiritual and literary companions are, without exception, human beings who have undergone seismic (if sometimes subterranean) shifts throughout the course of their lives. Sometimes we like those changes; praise be to God. Other times, though, we hate them. We’d prefer to flash-freeze these teachers of ours in some earlier stage, before that book, before that debacle, before that tragic last act.
But that’s not how life works. Every author, and every person, contains multitudes. Including Thomas Merton. So it seems just and right to grapple with these men and women in all their glorious complexity—and to keep on grappling, as long as it takes.
What I Might Read Next
Sitting right here on my desk is King: A Life ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the new 688-page biography by Jonathan Eig.
I might just read that next.
As always, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these reflections. And do let me know what you’re reading these days.
Tim