| Author Quoted | Maurice Merleau-Ponty |
| Title Quoted | Signes |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/01/18 |
| Imprint | [Paris] : Gallimard. [1960] |
| Quotation | "Le romancier tient à son lecteur, et tout homme à tout homme, un language d'inities: inities au monde, à l'univers des possibles que detient un corps humain" "The novelist converses with his reader in a language of initiates and every man to every man, people initiated into the universe of possibilities contained in the human body"] (Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 95). This describes exactly the awareness that is alive in Walker Percy's book-of the scene with the crippled child. "Ce que nous voulons dire n'est pas devant nous, hors de toute parole, comme une pure signification. Ce n'est que l'excès de ce que nous vivons sur ce qui a ete dejà dit" ["What we want to say is not right in front of us, outside of every word, as a pure signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said"] (Signes, p. 104). |
| Journal | Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 5, 1963-1965.; Edited by Robert E. Daggy. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1997, p. 64 |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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