Description
"This is quintessential Merton."—The Catholic Review.
"The moment of takeoff was ecstatic...joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering..." With these words, dated October 15. 1968, the late Father Thomas Merton recorded the beginning of his fateful journey to the Orient. His travels led him from Bangkok, through India to Ceylon, and back again to Bangkok for his scheduled talk at a conference of Asian monastic orders. There he unequivocally reaffirmed his Christian vocation. His last journal entry was made on December 8, 1968, two days before his untimely, accidental death. Amply illustrated with photographs he himself took along the way and fully indexed, the book also contains a glossary of Asian religious terms, a preface by the Indian scholar Amiya Chakravarty, a foreword and postscript by Brother Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani, as well as several appendices, among them the text of Merton's final address.
Reviews
"Painstakingly edited by a team of scholarly admirers, but still tantalizingly unfinished, the journal is a collage of Asian images, sacred and profane....And the book itself is a kind of mandala, drawing the reader deep into a philosophical analysis, then abruptly forcing him out into the physical world." — Time
Also By: Thomas Merton 
Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Paperback, 1968
Merton, one of the rare Western thinkers able to feel at home in the philosophies of the East, made the wisdom of Asia available to Westerners.
Selected Poems of Thomas Merton
Paperback, 2020
Selected Poems of Thomas Merton
E Book, 2020
Silence, Joy
E Book, 2018
An inspiring gift-edition of poetry and prose from the world's favorite monk-poet
Silence, Joy
Paperback, 2018
An inspiring gift-edition of poetry and prose from the world's favorite monk-poet
Also By: James Laughlin
The Life Before Us
Paperback, 2022
Now back in print, this heartbreaking novel by Romain Gary has inspired two movies, including the Netflix feature The Life Ahead
The Life Before Us
E Book, 2022
Now back in print, this heartbreaking novel by Romain Gary has inspired two movies, including the Netflix feature The Life Ahead
The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
Hardback, 2018
Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
E Book, 2018
Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.
Christmas Poems
E Book, 2014
Awake the voice! Awake the string!
Dark and dull night fly hence away,
And give the honor of this day
That sees December turned to May.
—William Herrick
