{"id":10286,"date":"2025-03-20T15:13:37","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T19:13:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/thomas-merton-on-solitude-and-the-soul-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-03-20T15:13:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T19:13:37","slug":"thomas-merton-on-solitude-and-the-soul-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/thomas-merton-on-solitude-and-the-soul-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Merton on Solitude and the Soul \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSolitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,\u201d Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny<\/a>. \u201cSolitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.\u201d On the one hand, destiny is a ramshackle concept, trembling with reverberations of determinism and self-recusal from responsibility \u2014 we shape the path of our lives with our choices, often not knowing or not wanting to know that we are choosing with every action at every turn, then look back on the trail and call it destiny. On the other, some things in life seem indeed to choose us and not we them: our birth, to begin with; our talents; great love<\/a>. Solitude may be one of those things \u2014 a life of solitude, whether it lasts a lifetime or a season of being<\/a>, chooses the solitary as much as the solitary chooses it. <\/p>\n

The theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton<\/strong> (January 31, 1915\u2013December 10, 1968) takes up the choice of solitude, its preconditions and its consequences, in a thirty-page essay titled \u201cNotes for a Philosophy of a Solitude,\u201d found in his 1960 collection Disputed Questions<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a fine addition to the canon of great artists, writers, and scientists who have reaped and extolled the creative and spiritual rewards of solitude<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as a greeting card<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Merton defines the solitary as a person who undertakes \u201cthe lonely, barely comprehensible, incommunicable task of working his way through the darkness of his own mystery.\u201d (A necessary note on the universal pronoun<\/a> before you proceed.) To choose solitude or be chosen by it is \u201can arid, rugged purification of the heart,\u201d \u201ca quiet and humble refusal to accept the myths and fictions with which social life cannot help but be full,\u201d a form of resistance to the \u201cdiversion\u201d and \u201csystematic distraction\u201d our culture has designed to keep us from facing our mystery and our mortality. An epoch before social media, he observes:<\/p>\n

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The function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The solitary is one who is called to make one of the most terrible decisions possible to man: the decision to disagree completely with those who imagine that the call to diversion and self-deception is the voice of truth and who can summon the full authority of their own prejudice to prove it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Diversions, he notes, may be plainly absurd, such as the compulsion for status and the obsession with money, or they \u201cmay assume a hypocritical air of intense seriousness, for instance in a mass movement.\u201d In a passage of extraordinary relevance today, he writes:<\/p>\n

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The break with the big group is compensated by enrollment in the little group. It is a flight not into solitude but into a protesting minority. Such a flight may be more or less honest, more or less honorable. Certainly it inspires the anger of those who believe themselves to be the \u201cright thinking majority\u201d and it necessarily comes in for its fair share of mockery on that account\u2026 [There is a] process of falsification and corruption which these groups almost always undergo. They abandon one illusion which is forced on everyone and substitute for it another, more esoteric illusion, of their own making. They have the satisfaction of making a choice, but not the fulfilment of having chosen reality.<\/p>\n

The true solitary is not called to an illusion, to the contemplation of himself as solitary. He is called to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach<\/em>, 1931 \u2014 one of Hasui Kawase\u2019s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a high price to pay for such renunciation of illusion:<\/p>\n

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[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude\u2026 The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one\u2019s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less \u201cwell organized\u201d and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos\u2026 It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patterns, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or asking if they have any practical consequences in one\u2019s life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Merton distills the reward on the other side of the renunciation:<\/p>\n

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Interior solitude\u2026 is the actualization of a faith in which a man takes responsibility for his own inner life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is interesting to read Merton \u2014 a deep thinker, but also a deeply religious thinker \u2014 as someone who believes that chance, not God, is the supreme creative agent of the universe; that the laws of nature, written in its native language of mathematics, are more sacred than any scripture; that we bless our own lives<\/a> by being awake to the sheer wonder of existence. It is always salutary to engage with worldviews profoundly different from your own \u2014 it both expands and anneals your own sense of reality (reality being the thing that persists whether or not you believe in it) \u2014 until they open into something larger. In Merton\u2019s faith, I find an invitation to self-transcendence that need not be religious, I find a poetics of the possible. And, as the teenage Sylvia Plath told her mother<\/a>, \u201conce a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Solitude<\/em> by Maria Popova. Available as a print<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Merton considers the meaning of self-transcendence:<\/p>\n

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The true solitary is not one who simply withdraws from society. Mere withdrawal, regression, leads to a sick solitude, without meaning and without fruit. The solitary of whom I speak is called not to leave society but to transcend it.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

If every society were ideal, then every society would help its members only to a fruitful and productive self-transcendence. But in fact societies tend to lift a man above himself only far enough to make him a useful and submissive instrument in whom the aspirations, lusts and needs of the group can function unhindered by too delicate a personal conscience. Social life tends to form and educate a man, but generally at the price of a simultaneous deformation and perversion. This is because civil society is never ideal, always a mixture of good and evil, and always tending to present the evil in itself as a form of good.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Such self-transcendence can be found only by quieting the din of social conditioning to hear one\u2019s inner silence \u2014 that empty and receptive place where true solitude is found, a place so remote from the surface of being that even those determined to reach it are regularly derailed:<\/p>\n

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Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies<\/em><\/a> by Ruth Krauss<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Merton admonishes against approaching solitude as another point of achievement to be worn as a badge on the lapel of the self in a society that fetishizes individualism. True solitude, rather \u2014 like love, like art<\/a> \u2014 is an instrument of unselfing. He writes:<\/p>\n

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The price of fidelity in such a task is a completely dedicated humility \u2014 an emptiness of heart in which self-assertion has no place. For if he is not empty and undivided in his own inmost soul, the solitary will be nothing more than an individualist. And in that case, his non-conformity is nothing but an act of rebellion: the substitution of idols and illusions of his own choosing for those chosen by society. And this, of course, is the greatest of dangers\u2026 For to forget oneself, at least to the extent of preferring a social myth with a certain limited productiveness, is a lesser evil than clinging to a private myth which is only a sterile dream.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Noting that most people \u201ccannot live fruitfully without a large proportion of fiction in their thinking,\u201d he adds:<\/p>\n

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It is a vocation to become fully awake<\/em>, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

One who seeks to enter into this kind of solitude by affirming himself, and separating himself from others, and intensifying his awareness of his own individual being, is only travelling further and further away from it. But the one who has been found by solitude, and invited to enter it, and has entered freely, falls into the desert the way a ripe fruit falls out of a tree. It does not matter what kind of a desert it may be: in the midst of men or far from them. It is the one vast desert of emptiness which belongs to no one and to everyone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a sentiment evocative of Pablo Neruda\u2019s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech<\/a>, Merton observes:<\/p>\n

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True solitude is not mere separateness. It tends only to unity<\/em>. The true solitary does not renounce anything that is basic and human about his relationship to other men. He is deeply united to them \u2014 all the more deeply because he is no longer entranced by marginal concerns. What he renounces is the superficial imagery and the trite symbolism that pretend to make the relationship more genuine and more fruitful.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

One who is called to solitude is not called merely to imagine himself solitary, to live as if he were solitary, to cultivate the illusion that he is different, withdrawn and elevated. He is called to emptiness. And in this emptiness he does not find points upon which to base a contrast between himself and others. On the contrary, he realizes, though perhaps confusedly, that he has entered into a solitude that is really shared by everyone<\/em>. It is not that he is solitary while everybody else is social: but that everyone is solitary, in a solitude masked by that symbolism which they use to cheat and counteract their solitariness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What the solitary renounces is not connection, not community, but \u201cthe deceptive fictions and inadequate symbols which tend to take the place of genuine social unity.\u201d Merton writes:<\/p>\n

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The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual. Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men, whether or not they are capable of realizing the tragedy of their plight.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Complement with Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor on solitude as contemplative and creative practice<\/a> and poet May Sarton on the art of living alone<\/a>, then revisit Merton\u2019s magnificent letter to Rachel Carson (which is how I first became acquainted with his mind) about civilizational self-awareness and the measure of wisdom<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSolitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,\u201d Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny. \u201cSolitude comes to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}