The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedArthur Koestler
Title QuotedDarkness at Noon
Date (Year/Month/Day)1957/05/01
Imprint[S.l.] : MacMillan. 1940
Quotation"Once, when the great ‘we' still existed, we understood them as one had understood them before. We had penetrated into their depths, we walked in the amorphous raw material of history itself"¦At that time we were called the Party of the Plebs. What did the others know of history? Passing ripples, little eddies, and breaking waves. They wondered at the changing forms of the surface and could not explain them. But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous, which at all times constituted the substance of history and we were the first to discover the laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia, of the now changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions. That was the function of our doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists, we were empirics. "We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever has been known about material. That is why our revolution succeeded. And now you have buried it all again." Rubashov in Koestler's Darkness at Noon
Quotation SourceA Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3, 1952-1960.; Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1996, p. 88
Letter to 
Notes 
Link to Merton's Copy  

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