| Author Quoted | Jean Cayrol |
| Title Quoted | Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1951/04/06 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1946 |
| Quotation | camps. When first arrested, they dreamt they had not been arrested but had escaped. Then, resigned to their arrest, they dreamt they were allowed to go home from time to time. This in prison, before the camp itself. In the concentration camp magnificent dreams of landscapes, of baroque architecture. Color in their dreams. (And I thought of Doctor Morris Thompson in Louisville who was telling everybody about his visions of color. Doctor Henry thought he was going crazy!) Blue dreams, green dreams, red dreams of salvation. A sailor who saw a diamond cross rising out of the sea. Dreams which tell us something about our own immediate future! Things the body already knows before the soul has found them out. Jung, I think, holds something to this effect. This worked out in those salvation dreams. I have walked alone on the road to the barns, looking at the high clouds and thinking, "In war and in battle men look up sometimes and see such clouds as these." Cayrol tells of the Appel [roll-call] at Mauthausen, men being beaten up in the presence of a magnificent sunset on the Austrian Alps. The ones who were completely incommunicado were called Nacht und Nebel [Night and Mist], which might conceivably be the name of a perfume. And I thought of St. John of the Cross. His Spiritual Canticle was born of the imprisonment at Toledo! Confirmation of Cayrol's thesis in these two studies. |
| Quotation Source | Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and Writer. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 2, 1941-1952.; Edited by Jonathan Montaldo. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1996, p. 454 |
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| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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