Setting a Book Aside

 2/25/23

          About two years ago, I picked up a Thomas Merton book and read a few pages and put it down and later gave it away.

          Merton wrote about the virtues and benefits of solitude.

          He knew what he wrote about, having lived and contemplated for years as a monk and many people I know appreciated his ideas, among them Kris. The book was his, found in one of the boxes of papers I sorted through alongside photographs and fifteen-year-old notes from friends and piles of ancient receipts and ephemera. I kept a handful of his books and gave others away.

          I’d always thought I might read Merton, having encountered him at essay length and wanting more. But at that moment reading a paean to solitude jabbed me, reopening fresh wounds.

          In early 2021 we neared the end of the first plague year. I’d been cut off from nearly all friends and family for months, and Kris had succumbed to cancer the previous August. Solitude, like any good form of discipline, can become too extreme. Circumstance had isolated me so extensively that I was probably clinically depressed but that didn’t seem unusual or special at the time since so many people experienced that, then. I missed Kris terribly. I saw a few friends once a week, people who were already Covid survivors as I was, and that kept me going. Barely. Solitude in excess nearly cut off my air.

          Sometimes a good book arrives at the wrong moment. I may take it up again or another Merton title someday. We’ll see—because today I ran across the following prayer from the same book, words I don’t recall having read before, but they became at once my prayer too.

Merton wrote, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone” (from Thoughts on Solitude, 1956).