Evan’s Reviews > The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton > Status Update

My roommate in Ukraine had this book- or maybe something else by Merton. In any case, he (my roommate) was 60 at the time, and had just come from living in a Trappist monastery. To say it wasn't for him would be an understatement, as I learned later during our time together, when he would tell me stories about the borderline-sadistic treatment the other monks supposedly subjected him to. He sometimes sounded a little crazy, like when he would mention "a dead monk in Guatemala" that he hadn't been supposed to find out about. I'll never know if he was telling the truth, but I guess the upshot is that he'd given up on the idea of living out the rest of his days in a Trappist monastery. And yet he still carried around Merton.

Mike wrote: "My roommate in Ukraine had this book"

I watched a documentary on him last night just to give me the highlights as a guideline. The media around here haven't shut up about him my whole life so I decided it's time to find out why. The book is by a guy who has clearly read everything by and about him and the author seems more interested in showing his prowess as such in discerning between the conflicting accounts than in just plowing ahead with the story as a novelistic narrative which is what I kinda wanted but which isn't quite what this is, and which might wear me down but so far I'm hanging with it. The Trappist monastery south of here where he lived apparently was also very austere and harsh but presumably Merton's talent made them willing to bend the rules of non-worldliness to let him publish, even though Merton allegedly protested doing any of that as he wanted to commit to the monastic rules. They evidently saw some advantage of having PR, of a sort. I know a guy who stayed at Gesthemane once and said it was a great experience for him, as a Catholic guy at any rate, It sounds good on the surface but apparently it's cold as shit in monasteries but I don't know if that's been changed. The place makes really good cheese and fruitcake that's sold by mail order and at a few local outlets but it's gotten too expensive for me to buy anymore. The fruitcake especially, made with bourbon or rum, can't remember, is outstanding and might convince even those who claim to hate that kind of thing to reconsider.

Addition: Your friend probably had Merton's book, The Seven-Storey Mountain (his most famous and bestselling), a title which this author kinda lifts for this biography as, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. It's clever but probably creates marketplace confusion, I imagine.

Yeah, that's probably the book he had. He was from Ohio, incidentally, so not too far away from your/Merton's neck of the woods. Hopefully the narrative becomes a bit more propulsive and novelistic and doesn't spend too much time in the weeds of feuding accounts of Merton's life. My roommate's backstory definitely intrigued me at the time, and a part of me was drawn to the idea of asceticism, but even then I was more interested in the Buddhist variety- that idea that suffering is caused by attachment, and so we should learn not to be attached. Nowadays I think I'm more accepting both of having attachments and the inevitable suffering that comes with them.

I'm more than halfway done with it now, though the page count is off due to the back quarter being all footnotes and sources. The book is really less than 600 true pages. It really has picked up and I'm blazing through it now. Mott's writing is oddly structured at times but when Merton is saying or doing something interesting to me that doesn't seem to be damaged by the way this guy turns a phrase. Mott is clearly trying to affect a neutrality even though the pull to hagiography is always strong, naturally, given one's pull to write this complete an account on anything due to admiration of the subject, and sometimes that objectivity can be a flaw if a superlative is merited. One thing I noticed is he talked greatly about the process of Merton and those around him getting The Seven Storey Mountain published and then how well it sold, but failing to substantially say why the public was so drawn to, or inspired by it. This is the worst omission in the book and I wish I'd been this guy's editor to tell him to flesh that out. Anyway, I'm still enjoying it and learning a lot. This fallen Catholic largely approves.

Mike wrote: "etc."

I should have mentioned that Merton did examine Eastern religions and compared them to his own monastic sacrifices etc. That comes up more later in the book as he becomes a hermit, though it seems the more hermetic he got the more he got to travel, including to the East, and seemed to make time for a little vow-breaking dalliance, so if that's monasticism it's starting to look better, haha. But yes, the concepts, ergo attachments, you describe here are very much part of Merton's self dialogue and with the reader.