| Author Quoted | |
| Title Quoted | Poems on Solitude / Transl. from the Chinese by Jerome Chen and Mike Bullock |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1961/12/12 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : Abelard & Schuman. 1960 |
| Quotation | "¦ Someone has recently sent me a marvelous book, Poems of Solitude, a collection including Juan Chi, Pao Chao, Wang Wei, Li Ho and Li Yu. Maybe you are right about my being Chinese, because this kind of thing is just what makes me feel most happy and most at home. I do not know whether or not I am always happy with mystical writings that are completely out of touch with ordinary life. On the contrary, it seems to me that mysticism flourishes most purely right in the middle of the ordinary. And such mysticism, in order to flourish, must be quite prompt to renounce all apparent claim to be mystical at all: after all, what difference do labels make? I know you agree, for this is what St. Therèse so well saw. |
| Quotation Source | The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1985, p. 620 |
| Letter to | John C.H. Wu |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
(If there is a link above showing up as a number, click it to open another window with a full text version.) |