The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedRose Macaulay
Title QuotedPersonal Pleasures
Date (Year/Month/Day)1962/07/14
Imprint[S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1935
QuotationReading Rose MacCauley's Personal Pleasures-published 1935. Therefore her swim in the Cam [river in Cambridge] might well have been the same year as mine, though probably earlier. An entrancing book, and baffling, for that world has ceased to exist so completely: yet thirty years ago it was the only world I dreamed of as possible. The world of civilization and books and ease, and humor and perhaps a lot of nonsense and falsity that did not have to be taken too seriously. Since that day, absurdity has won. Her lovely piece on the "Bird in the Box," and on "Book Auctions" too. But the bird has become a symbol of that whole world, and I suppose without fully realizing it, she knew this!
Quotation SourceTurning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 4, 1960-1963.; Edited by Victor A. Kramer. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1996, p. 231
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