| Author Quoted | Rafael Squirru |
| Title Quoted | Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to the Latin American Scene |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/07/12 |
| Imprint | Washington DC : Pan American Union. 1964 |
| Quotation | Many thanks for your little book on the "New Man." I have read it carefully and with pleasure and want to congratulate you on it. I especially liked the essays on the poet and on the role of the intellectual. It seems to me that this little book represents a vitally important trend of thought, and you know of course how much I agree with it. The thinking of the public, especially in the "‘great powers," seems to me to be hallucinated by the unreal concept of what one might call an Atlantic gigantism (except that it would have to include Russia and even China). The belief that the only kind of thinking that is real and meaningful is that which is associated with European and North American thought patterns, extending this also to Chinese Marxism. But this cerebration leaves out most of the human race, most of its needs, most of its aspirations. It has proved itself completely incapable of really solving the problems of man and is now increasingly incapable even of defining them. |
| Quotation Source | The Courage for Truth: Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers.; Selected and edited by Christine M. Bochen. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1993, p. 232 |
| Letter to | Rafael Squirru |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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