Contentness to Be Unseen

Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience

Man has lost the courage and the faith without which he cannot be content to be "unseen." He is pitifully dependent on self-observation and self-assertion.

- Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience

As is often the case with many modern maladies, the roots were usually planted long before the effects came to complete and culture-wide fruition. Today’s preoccupation with identities, and with asserting and having those identities recognized, was already obvious to American Trappist monk Thomas Merton in 1959 while writing The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (a book that he didn’t get around to revising before his death, but that was eventually published in 2003).