Author Quoted | Aeschylus |
Title Quoted | Prometheus Bound |
Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1960/01/17 |
Imprint | |
Quotation | After dinner-read the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Shattered by it. I do not know when I have read anything so stupendous and so completely contemporary. I felt like throwing away everything and reading nothing but Aeschylus for six months. Like discovering a mountain full of diamond mines. It is like Zen-like Dostoevsky-like existentialism-like Francis-like the New Testament. It is inconceivably rich. I consider this a great grace on the feast of St. Anthony! A great religious experience. Prometheus, archetypal representation of the suffering Christ. But we must go deep into this. Prometheus startles us by being more fully Christ than the Lord of our own cliches-I mean, he is free from all the falsifications and limitations of our hackneyed vision which has slowly emptied itself of reality. |
Quotation Source | A 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. 370 |
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Link to Merton's Copy |
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