He is also an intensely personal writer. With little taste for the driest of abstractions and possessed of a keen eye for the common yet unacknowledged epiphanies of the divine at the very heart of the ordinary, Merton examined every thought, feeling, and impression through the lens of his own experience. The monk who sought the elimination of the "I" was the very same writer who nurtured it. In sum: the paradox of the divided self, the marriage of heaven and hell.

Thomas Merton was an essayist, poet, calligrapher, photographer, controversialist, social and political commentator, editor, anthologist, translator, and sometime cartoonist. He was a religious thinker of Blakean propensities, a correspondent of gargantuan energy, and a belle-lettrist of startling virtuosity. But we continue to read him, primarily, for the same reason that we read St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and Simone Weil: the personal voice, the personal revelation, the confessional tone.

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