| Author Quoted | Ernesto Cardenal |
| Title Quoted | Gethsemani, Ky |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1966/01/17 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1960 |
| Quotation | Your piece on Cardenal's Gethsemani was very good. You are right that Cardenal is now this way and now that, doubtless. You have no idea how difficult and complex a task he has taken upon himself, to be a poet and a priest at the same time and in a society that is completely fed up with priests. He is just beginning, and the task of being two people is still difficult. Only when one realizes that one cannot be two people, can one be two or many people, that is everybody. No priest and no poet is really mature until he is everybody. But who is everybody? One lets go a little, and one begins to disappear in everybody, and then one wakes up and begins to defend a limited identity once again. An uncomfortable existence. This discomfort is not necessary for those who identify themselves completely with a Church (like the ordinary priest) or a party (like the Communists). |
| Quotation Source | The Courage for Truth: Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers.; Selected and edited by Christine M. Bochen. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1993, p. 228 |
| Letter to | Ludovico Silva |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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