Merton lives the life of an "intellectual" . . .
The end of January came. I remember, when I took my exams for the M.A., I went to Communion two days in a row, and both days I was very happy, and also I did quite well in the examinations. So after that I thought it was necessary for me to go to Bermuda for a week, and sit in the sun, and go swimming, and ride bicycles along those empty white roads, rediscovering the sights and smells that had belonged to a year of my early childhood. I met a lot of people who liked to ride around all night in a carriage singing: “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah—strumming on the old banjo.” The weather was so good that I came back to New York brown and full of health, with my pocket full of snapshots of the strangers with whom I had been dancing and sailing in yachts. And I was just in time to see Bramachari leave for India, at last, on the Rex. He was sailing with the Cardinals who were off to elect the new Pope.
Then I went to Greenwich Village and signed a lease for a one-room apartment and started work on my Ph.D. I suppose the apartment on Perry Street was part of the atmosphere appropriate to an intellectual such as I imagined myself to be and, as a matter of fact, I felt much more important in this large room with a bath and fireplace and French windows leading out on to a rickety balcony than I had felt in the little place ten feet wide behind the Columbia Library. Besides, I now had a shiny new telephone all my own which rang with a deep, discreet, murmuring sort of a bell as if to invite me suavely to expensive and sophisticated pursuits.
I don’t, as a matter of fact, remember anything very important happening over that telephone, except that I used to make dates with a nurse who was stationed in one of the clinics out at the World’s Fair which opened that year on Flushing Meadows. Also, it was the occasion of a series of furiously sarcastic letters to the telephone company because of various kinds of troubles, mechanical and financial.
The one I most talked to, over this phone, was Lax. He had a phone which did not even cost him anything, for he was living in the Hotel Taft, tutoring the children of the manager, and having access to an ice-box full of cold chicken at all hours of the day and night. The two principal items of news which he communicated to me, from his point of vantage, were, first, the appearance of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and, second, the election of Pope Pius XII.
It was one of those first spring mornings when the new, warm sun is full of all kinds of delights, that I heard about the Pope. I had been sitting on the balcony in a pair of blue dungarees, drinking Coca-Cola, and getting the sun. When I say sitting on the balcony, I mean sitting on the good boards and letting my feet dangle through the place where the boards had broken. This was what I did a great deal of the time, in the mornings, that spring: surveying Perry Street from the east, where it ran up short against a block of brick apartments, to the west, where it ended at the river, and you could see the black funnels of the Anchor liners.
When I wasn’t sitting on this balcony doing nothing, I was in the room, in the deepest armchair, studying the letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his Notebooks and trying to figure out various manuals on prosody and covering little white index cards with notes. For it was my plan to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Hopkins.
The typewriter that was always open on the desk was sometimes busy when I got a book to review: for I had been doing occasional reviews for the Sunday book sections of the Times and Herald Tribune. But what was better, I sometimes managed to grind out, with labor and anguish, some kind of a poem.
I had never been able to write verse before I became a Catholic. I had tried, but I had never really succeeded, and it was impossible to keep alive enough ambition to go on trying. I had started once or twice at Oakham, and I had written two or three miserable things at Cambridge. At Columbia, when I thought I was a Red, I got one stupid idea for a poem, about workers working on a dock and bombing planes flying overhead—you know: ominous. When it got on paper it was so silly that not even the magazines on the Fourth Floor would print it. The only other verse I had ever been able to turn out before my Baptism was an occasional line for the Jester.
Baptism seems to have worked miracles in Merton's life. Going to Church, studying literature, gives him purpose and energy. Although he still hasn't fully surrendered himself to God's will, he is still able to accomplish things that his previous hedonistic life never allowed--including writing poems. Baptism and Communion and Mass bring about a change in Merton, inching him toward the religious life he would later adopt.
Since the Presidential Inauguration last Wednesday, I have noticed a new kind of energy in the air. A lightness that hasn't existed for about four years. We, in the United States, have lived through a time characterized by meanness of spirit, absence of compassion, and ignorance of truth. I have lived through the administrations of nine presidencies, Republicans and Democrats. I haven't always agreed with the politics or policies of these leaders. However, I never questioned their basic human decency.
Now, in these first days since President Biden took office, there has been a popular meme of Bernie Sanders dominating social media. It's Bernie Sanders at the inauguration, in mittens and hat. Looking like the old, hippy grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner who will speak his mind no matter what. Confession: I love Bernie Sanders. Love the fact that his message has never changed from day one: he wants a world where everyone is taken care of. Everyone has healthcare. Everyone makes a living wage. Everyone pays their fair share of taxes, with the wealthiest paying the most, as it should be.
Bernie Sanders' presence at the inauguration on Wednesday was a reminder to everyone that there are people in Washington, D. C., and the world, who will fight for what is right and humane, no matter what.
Yesterday, I read a Facebook post about the wave of Bernie memes that has stormed the Internet. It was written by person named Robin Tala. Here is a part of what Robin said:
If Biden's inauguration is our relief, then Bernie is our cleaning. He's basically a giant smudging, clearing the malevolent energy & ushering a new time of recommitment to our values of peace & justice.
. . .
All this struck a deep chord in our society's psyche & heart space and we all bowed and venerated him [Bernie Sanders] with our love, humor, & joy.
It's so beautiful to witness this collective online ritual of relief, especially when we cannot be together to celebrate in person.
THANK YOU to Bernie Sanders, for being the elder that we need in our culture, the curmudgeonly revolutionary uncle, the warrior for justice, the guardian of our culture's inherent commitment to care & solidarity.
You give us all so much hope & strength to keep on marching for the future we KNOW is possible.
My sister, Rose, is still in the hospital. They've changed her medications, and she has been showing a little improvement. That is a miracle. Rose, for me, sort of represents what is good in the world. She's loving, kind, gentle. Always happy to see me, even if she can't remember who I am and calls me by my brother's name. She, like Bernie, is a smudging, as well, clearing out all the meanness, all the darkness of the world.
And Bernie Sanders would love Rose. I know this in my heart. He would want her cared and provided for. That's what we should all want. To help everyone, no matter how poor or how sick or how in need.
Saint Marty gives thanks the miracle of Bernie memes tonight. And his sister Rose.
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