The Other Side of the Mountain

by Thomas Merton

  “All who have achieved real excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind sees is flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.”

  (Penguin—p.72)

  I suspect that the Western language and vocabulary could be most misleading here. V.S. “one with nature” as a kind of foggy pantheism. The point: not seeing something etc. than what is. Seeing it in its isness-and not interpreting it or dressing it up with “mind.”

  In town—George picked up another blank book like this-and some ball-point refills.

  December 22, 1967

  After a couple of warm, spring-like days (rainy though) it is cold and looks like snow. Real Advent weather. Christmas is very close. In the avalanche of cards, etc., a couple of fat envelopes have arrived with some poems for the magazine I thought of starting: it would be only four issues. Monk’s Pond (maybe as title). Some good poems from Margaret Randall (sad-sad-about her breakup with Sergio). Others from Keith Wilson, whom I’m going to like, I think. There’s also an old unpublished piece on Tibetan mysticism by [Walter Yeeling] Evans-Wentz I might use.

  I finished the Time-Life Bible Introduction—very glad to get it off my back too! Relieved. I hope I don’t get into anything else like that. Yesterday afternoon as I was walking along thinking about it on the road by the Sheepbarn, I consoled myself with the thought I was getting ten dollars a page and then with a shock realized I was getting a hundred dollars a page. That didn’t make me feel better. On the contrary: that’s the trouble! I feel more at home-and write better-when I am doing something for the Catholic Worker for nothing.

  Idiot monastery business. Sunday I announced tersely at my conference that under no circumstances would I accept the job of abbot. Later, perhaps facetiously, I mimeographed a statement, giving various reasons. I thought the touch was light enough, but today I got an irate note from the Prior blowing off steam about it, saying I had insulted the community, was wildly uncharitable, and comparing me to Bernard Shaw (as a satanic monster of pride). Apparently what troubled people most was the sentence where I said I did not want to spend the rest of my life “arguing about trifles with 125 confused and anxiety-ridden monks.” This evidently threw a lot of people into tailspins, thereby proving that I was right.

  But in a thing like this it is not enough to be “right.” The fact is that the community is full of half-sick people, immensely vulnerable, wasting their lives in petty, neurotic machinations-and one simply does not needle such people. It does no good, and encourages their sickness. Also it is perhaps more the fault of the system than their own. I should not have hurt them. Actually, living apart from the “community,” I forget what a hornet’s nest it really can be. And all these people suffer intensely and make each other suffer. I have no business stirring it all up and making it worse. The frantic indignation of the Prior was really rather pitiful. Here is a mature and presumably experienced man: and he is so hypersensitive and unbalanced! Furthermore, some people are seriously thinking of him as abbot. God help us if he (Anastasius) is elected! It will be even more of a looney bin than it is already.

  Actually, it is saddening. And I feel so foolish and helpless. Foolish for having stayed here so long: helpless to do anything to improve matters-not feeling that I should really leave…At least I should keep my mouth shut, be more considerate, and also stay out of their way.

  It is always uncomfortable to know that you have to live with other people’s delusions about you, of one kind or another. No point in overstimulating their imaginations and their resentments!

  The only man I think capable of handling the job of abbot adequately-if anyone-is Fr. Flavian. I don’t see anyone else to vote for. The saner part of the community seems to be for him. The absentee votes might swing it against him, for Baldwin.

  December 23. 1967

  It is going to be a cold night. Bright stars, cold woods, silence. A card from M. today: thought of her suddenly the other day, almost saw her it was so vivid. That was the day the card was mailed. From C———-, not M———-. Certainly I feel less real, somehow, without our constant communication, our sense of being in communion (so intense last year). The drab, futile silences of this artificial life, with all its tensions and its pretenses: but I know it would be worse somewhere else. And marriage, for me, would be terrible! Anyway, that’s all over. In a month I’ll be 53, and no one in his right mind would get married for the first time at such an age.

  Yet this afternoon I wondered if I’d really missed the point of life after all. A dreadful thought!

  I gave the hermitage a good cleaning. Burned a lot of Christmas cards and wrappings. Repaired the stile that rotted and broke under me a few weeks ago. Ready for Christmas. Today I went down early for an ordination Mass. Brother Jerome from Vina, subdeacon. Thought of my own subdiaconate nineteen years ago. Things look very different now.

  Some good poems came today from Lorine Niedecker. Superb poems in fact! Like her very much. Same kind of fascination as Louis Zukofsky (to whom lowe a letter).

  December 24,1967. Sunday and Christmas Eve

  With my breakfast I read an appalling article in Italian on “The Monk in the Church. “The Church is a big sacramental machine. In it the monastery has its place as a “center of edification” because of the “exercises of the contemplative life.” But aha! There is a problem! If the Bishop is Father of the Diocese and Abbot is Father of the monastery, Saperisti [“those in the know”]! Two Fathers! Aha! Another answer. The Bishop is Father of sacraments, the Abbot is Father of asceticism. Valid Sacrament, come from Papa Bishop. Valid obedience and humiliations from Papa Abbot: Viva!

  All this is based on Vatican II, which makes me wonder what is so new about Perfectae caritatis [Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life]. The whole thing is sickening. The mechanical, cause-and-effect, official machinery of Catholicism. Dreadfully dead, putrid. And yet people are committed to this insane validism, this unchristian obsession: obviously someone like our poor Prior knows nothing else but this moronic one-two-three system of compulsions. And how can you tell them anything else? It is the old hang-up on magic: following the instructions on the bottle to get the infallible effect. A monastery is a place where, though there are more detailed instructions on the bottle, we follow them all meticulously, and the whole Church turns on with our magic tonic. Is LSD more honest? We do this because we think it makes us respectable: we are fully justified by Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline and by blind obedience to the ascetic Dad, no matter how absurd.

  The Church is a great treadmill, and when you turn it, it churns out an ineffable substance called grace, and he who gets his pail full is thereafter untouchable, impervious to everything, neither man nor God can tell him anything. He is justified. He is right. He has a right to bash your head in if you even think of questioning it.

  December 26, 1967

  Christmas night—was good. Dom James’ last sermon—simple and quite moving. The Mass was uncomplicated and everyone seemed much more awake and alive than last year, apparently because they had had an English Vigil they enjoyed. Then there was the new church. When I got back I had several hours of curious, light, dream-filled sleep. I could not remember any of the dreams.

  Frs. Flavian and Hilarion came up after dinner for a General Chapter of hermits and the three of us drank up all my Mass wine. General subject of conversation: Flavian must be abbot and what to do about this place.

  Later I went over to Gannons’ and then their dog followed me back and I couldn’t get rid of it all night. Wouldn’t let it in or feed it. Finally when I got up it was so cold I let the dog in—by that time it was starved, ran in triumphantl
y and jumped on my bed with enormous tail wagging and saying “I love you—feed me!” I finally took the dog back about 8:3o-everybody worried and Mom G. out looking for it all over the place.

  More good poems came in today. I had to write a few letters and finally got out for a short walk.

  December 30, 1967

  Very cold. Down around zero. Snow. Bright stars. Strange crackings in the big water buckets under the gutters—I forgot to empty them and the bottoms will break out under the pressure of ice!

  The other day I had a talk with Fr. Anastasius making (I hope) peace, but he still seems tense and suspicious. I don’t think it is really possible to get along completely with him, but with an effort we’ll manage, though if he is abbot it would take some doing! I might have to go to Chile (John Harris consulted the I Ching for me in Cornwall and turned up the same hexagram I did years ago when thinking of South America.

  Fear not

  Departure toward the South

  Brings good fortune!)

  Well. “One must see the great man!” Br. Frederic and Fr. Callistus will be here from Chile for the election and I will talk with them. Also Dom Colomban [abbot of Gethsemani’s founding abbey in France].

  How great can the man get? Letter from Cardinal Antoniutti reproving our Abbots for their reforming desires has not even been read here, not even the Prior has seen it. Dom James certainly has his own way of handling unpleasant orders from above. Ignoring them. I have learned that from him! I saw a copy of the letter sent by Fr. Anselm Atkins, from Ga. [Conyers] brought by John and June Yungblut who are here now, leaving today.

  I have [James] Mooney’s wonderful Ghost Dance book finally and am reading the new George Steiner book [Language and Silence] which critics have to a great extent ignored or treated coldly. Very good.

  January 3, 1968. Wednesday

  The year struggles with its own blackness.

  Dark, wet mush of snow under frozen rain for two days. Everything is curtained in purple greyness and ice. Fog gets in the throat. A desolation of wetness and waste, turning to mud.

  Only New Year’s Day was bright. Very cold. Everything hard and sparkling, trees heavy with snow. I went for a walk up the side of Vineyard Knob, on the road to the fire tower, in secret hope of “raising the sparks” (as the Hassidim say) and they rose a little. It was quiet, but too bright, as if this celebration belonged not to the new year or to any year.

  More germane to this new year is darkness, wetness, ice and cold, the scent of illness.

  But maybe that is good. Who can tell?

  In a couple of weeks we will have the abbatial election.

  In a few days Dom Colomban is coming from Melleray to preside. With him, from Chimay [Belgian monastery], editor of the Collectanea.

  Fr. Flavian seems to be our best hope for abbot. Dom James told him not to accept the election! Incredible! Fr. Flavian does not intend to follow any such advice if they vote for him!

  Yesterday I asked a local sage and oracle—Fr. Roger [Reno]—who was likely to get it. He said it was between Frs. Baldwin and Flavian and Dom Augustine of Georgia. He ought also I think take account of Fr. Anastasius the Prior and the conservatives’ candidate. Of these four I believe Fr. Anastasius is the one Dom James would settle for because then in effect he could continue to dominate the course of things in the monastery.

  January 4, 1967

  You shall not die in the bluegrass land of A….

  rather the gods intend you for Elysion

  with golden Rhadamanthos at the world’s end.

  (Fitzgerald’s Homer)

  The question of Chile is bound to come up when Fr. Callistus and Br. Frederic are here for the election. I have no intention of accepting superiorship there if I can help it (again—I can always refuse an election), nor do I have any intention of volunteering to go there (unless the situation here under a new abbot becomes impossible.)

  The morning was dark, with a harder bluer darkness than yesterday. The hills stood out stark and black, the pines were black over thin pale sheets of snow. A more interesting and tougher murkiness. Snowflakes began to blow when I went down to the monastery from the hermitage, but by 10:30 the sun was fairly out and it was rapidly getting colder.

  By afternoon it looked like a New Year—with fresh, cold light and a biting wind burnishing the frozen snow. A wind out of the NW from the Great Lakes.

  After cleaning up the cabinet where I keep writing materials (and finding two reams of paper I didn’t know I had) I went out for a walk in the wind.

  I am getting down to work on Nat Turner for Katallagete [Southern magazine]—a clever but false book I think.

  Evening—new moon—snow hard crackling and squealing under my rubber boots. The dark pines over the hermitage. The graceful black fans and branches of the tall oaks between my field and the monastery. I said Compline and looked at the cold valley and tasted its peace. Who is entitled to such peace? I don’t know. But I would be foolish to leave it for no reason.

  Incredible barbarity of the Viet Nam War—the weapons used, the ways of killing utterly defenseless people. It is appalling. Surely the moral sense of this country is eroded—except that there are protests and how few really know even a little of the facts! Certainly this can’t go on: the country is under judgment.

  January 5, 1967

  It is turning into the most brilliant of winters.

  At 6:45—stepped out into the zero cold for a breath of air. Dark. Brilliance of Venus hanging as it were on one of the dim horns of Scorpio. Frozen snow. Deep wide blue-brown tracks of the tractor that came to get my gas tank that other day when everything was mucky. Bright hermitage settled quietly under black pines. I came in from saying the Little Hours [Office during the day] and the Rosary in the snow with nose in pain and sinuses aching. Ears burn now in the silent sunlit room. Whisper of the gas fire. Blue shadows where feet have left frozen prints out there in the snow. I drank a glass of dry sherry and am warm! Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!

  Nat Turner is nothing but Styron’s own complex loneliness as a Southern writer. A well-fashioned book, but little or nothing to do with the real Turner—I have no sense that this fastidious and analytical mind is that of a prophet.

  George Steiner’s book Language and Silence is an important one and I can’t read more than half a page without having to get up and walk up and down and let all the ideas sink in a little. Very much on my wavelength. Interesting criticism of F.R. Leavis—both criticism and appreciation—failure of the peculiar kind of integrity Leavis represents because it closes in on itself, refuses the future, refuses most of the present, and then becomes mere snobbery. I am now in the article on Lévi-Strauss. The section on the Jews is harrowing, lucid, deep, everyone should know this!

  January 6, 1967. Epiphany

  Damp, leaden darkness. Falling snow (small wet flakes). Accidents. Yesterday in the frozen brightness I fell and badly bruised my knee—for a moment the pain gripped my guts with nausea and I thought I would pass out or vomit. Reeled—nowhere to sit. I think I may have broken the camera—the Rollerflex—i.e. bashed it so that the back may be letting in light. Will see what happens to this film in Gregory Griffin’s tank.

  Also another accident: yesterday morning woke up at the sound of a frozen gallon jug of water bursting—and the unfrozen water running out all over the floor. And this morning dropped an egg as I was getting it out of the icebox. My hands don’t feel and grip properly (awful clumsiness trying to load the camera).

  Last night curious dreams, perhaps about death. I am caught suddenly in a flood which has risen and cut off my way of escape—not all escape, but my way to where I want to go. Can go back to some unfamiliar place over there—where? Fields, snow, upriver, a road, a possible bridge left over from some other dream.

  (Sudden recollection and as it were a voice: “It is not a bridge”—i.e. no bridge necessary!)

  Yesterday—I went into the Guesthouse to see Dom Colomban and P. Charles Dumont who ar
rived Friday night—tales of their journey by air from Paris, and especially the wild ride from Kennedy to LaGuardia to make their connection.

  P. Charles speaks very softly with a Belgian accent and I can hardly distinguish what he is saying. Dom Colomban heartily approves my desire not to be Abbot. Lamentations on the abbatial condition (he is perfectly right).

  January 8, 1967

  Bitter cold. Zero. Clear. Frozen snow. At eight the red sun rose over the snowy woods with an old bit of con-trail bent over it in the sky like a circumflex accent.

  I finished (Saturday and with additions yesterday) the short piece on Pasternak’s Georgian Letters which Helen Wolff asked me to write. Am sending off today final tape of Vow of Conversation for typing. Working on Nat Turner. An ambiguous book, brilliant in parts, uncertain and tedious in others.

  George Steiner on Marxist critics, etc. Still interesting, but not the best part of the book. Useful however.

  Yesterday Dom Colomban got me before Mass in the Sacristy and asked me to come to dinner with him, Dom James and Fr. Charles in that Guest House Room. Drank white New York wine and talked French and had a long conversation with him afterwards—about the election etc. And about an invitation which has come from Dom Leclercq for me to attend a monastic-ecumenical meeting in Bangkok! Dom C. approves on principle but of course it is up to the next Abbot. The meeting is in December—but by that time probably the whole of SE Asia will be at war. (Though the Presidential election may make a difference. I doubt it however!)