Raids on the Unspeakable (New Directions Paperbook)

This small collection of Merton's essays presents the Trappist monk at his most bracing. Among other things, it sheds great light on that phenomenon we call the 1960s, which is when this book was first published. Even while writing about topics as diverse as Adolf Eichmann, Flannery O'Conner, and Prometheus, the essays engage the complicated history of those days head on, even while they explore the underlying spiritual issues. Above all, the essays celebrate the vigorous energy of life itself, uncontrolled, spontaneous, and natural--what Merton here calls the festival of rain: "all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees." Idiosyncratic, full of humor and poetic energy, these raids, as Merton himself says, "are not so much concerned with ethical principles and traditional answers ... but in difficult insights at a moment of human crisis." --Doug Thorpe