Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk

The third volume of Thomas Merton's journals chronicles Merton's attempts to reconcile his desire for solitude and contemplation with the demands of his new-found celebrity status within the strictures of conventional monastic life.As Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, critiques Thomas Merton's book "A Search for Solitude" he writes: "The trick is always to find the spiritual deeply embedded in this world, and to discover our own eternal dimensions in the midst of our foibles, failures, and sometimes neurotic idiosyncrasies. We have no better guide in these things than Merton, and you couldn't ask for a more lively writer." (Volume three.)