Tuesday
More Miscellaneous Rambling
Last week's spring blitz put me behind with blog post leads, so I broke this week's "MR" into two parts. * * * * * * * Thanks, incidentally, to TDE readers who send me interesting links. It's greatly appreciative, especially in the spring when little league, other family commitments, and gardening makes time more scarce than a sense of decency at a Walt Disney Company Board meeting. * * * * * * * A regular TDE reader tried to comment on my Waugh v. Merton post a few weeks ago, but comments were turned off (they turn off after about a week, to reduce spam). Anyway, he emailed me this: "I just loved the 7 volume Journals. Perhaps because within the Journal entries there are scores of comments about nature at the Abbey or outside his hermitage. Also think Seeds of Contemplation is a great book/instructional manual." He's right about Seeds. It is a good book, based on the small portions I've read. I've never read the Journals. Merton always makes me uncomfortable when he starts to stray. The mere fact that he (successfully) prevailed upon his Abbott to have Rachel Carson's Silent Spring read during dinner at the monastery (instead of, say, Scripture) jars me a bit. * * * * * * * Still, I enjoy authors' journals, so I suspect I'd enjoy Merton's, but I'd want it in Kindle format so I could cut-and-paste easily for TDE commenting. Unfortunately, the Kindle version is pretty salty ($91). * * * * * * * Why do I like journals? Hard to say, but it's probably a combination of seeing something "raw," which isn't much edited; seeing stuff that's a bit arcane; seeing stuff that wasn't good enough to publish by itself; seeing stuff that exposes the author's real soul, as opposed to stuff the author explicitly intended for public consumption. * * * * * * * That being said, when you read journals, you get a lot of crap, too. There are a lot of bad thoughts that the author himself may not have agreed with, but since it's just a journal and not a piece that went through extensive inner debate and discussion with editors and peers, the thought never came to completion or a justifiably early death before publication. * * * * * * * But that's part of the enjoyment, I suppose.
