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. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.
     Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.
     My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
     My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of the masses and for all the circumstances that impres an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decorations or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.
     Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
     I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my other some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
     If what most people take for granted were really true--if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.
     If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would have never entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man."

--Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pg. 1



Page one, guys. Page ONE. I just got this book in the mail today. There are 400 pages left. YES. Praise God for brilliant minds that choose to write honest things on paper that make the rest of us feel sane.