Now looking at a book by Merton. Everyone tells me I should be into Merton. But I find him careless with words – so many of them, I find myself skipping them and flipping to the back of the book to see how many more I have to read – and then he sets up oppositions which I cannot understand. Here I’m just a few pages into this book, and he has to attack cities:
Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing itself from renewing itself and man.
Bosh. Do we really need to listen to a man sitting in a cabin complaining about cities? What fool does not know that a well-built city is one of the wonders of nature? Everyone has their weak point, their spot where they cannot thank God for making certain things; but religious people are supposed to know better and edit these thoughts out when they make them public. Religious people are supposed to know that God made people who live in cities too. Indeed the image of religious fulfillment is a city. I for one have never seen why people cannot love cities and nature both.
Anyway, I will let Merton write and I will read it, but these oppositions are all in his mind.
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