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612-822-4611
Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing

Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing

Paperback

General Reference

Publisher Price: $32.95

ISBN10: 1590303482
ISBN13: 9781590303481
Publisher: New Seeds
Published: Feb 13 2007
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.58 Depth: 8.42
Language: English

When Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery in December 1941, he turned his back on secular life--including a very promising literary career. He sent his journals, a novel-in-progess, and copies of all his poems to his mentor, Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, for safe keeping, fully expecting to write little, if anything, ever again. It was a relatively short-lived resolution, for Merton almost immediately found himself being assigned writing tasks by his Abbot--one of which was the autobiographical essay that blossomed into his international best-seller The Seven Storey Mountain. That book made him famous overnight, and for a time he struggled with the notion that the vocation of the monk and the vocation of the writer were incompatible. Monasticism called for complete surrender to the absolute, whereas writing demanded a tactical withdrawal from experience in order to record it. He eventually came to accept his dual vocation as two sides of the same spiritual coin and used it as a source of creative tension the rest of his life.

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