Happy Birthday, Thomas Merton!

Today marks the birth of Thomas Merton, who writes at the beginning of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain: “On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.” His original opening line was supposed to be this:

When a man is conceived, when a human beng comes into nature as an individual, concrete, subsisting thing, a life, a person, then Gods image is minted into the world. A free, vital, self-moving entity, a spirit informing flesh, a complex of energies ready to be set into fruitful motion begins to flame with potential light and understanding and virtue, begins to flame with love, without which no spirit can exist. It is ready to realize no one knows what grandeurs. The vital center of this new creation is a free and spiritual principle they call a soul. The soul is the life of this being, and the life of the soul is the love that unites it to the principle of all life—God. The body that here has been made will not live forever. When the soul, the life, leaves it, it will be dead…

Robert Giroux, Merton’s publisher and college friend, writes: “I pointed out to Tom that he was writing an autobiography, and readers would want to know at the start who he was, where he came from, and how he got there. The opening was too abstract, prolix, dull. He cheerfully accepted the criticism and finally found the right beginning.”

(Drawing by Pat McNamara, 1992)