| Author Quoted | E. M. Forster |
| Title Quoted | Abinger Harvest |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1960/09/09 |
| Imprint | New York : [s.n.]. 1953 |
| Quotation | Brought back from the library, for light reading, O[liver] St. John Gogarty's Week End in the Middle of the Week and could not stand it. Empty, absurd, it antagonized me. That peculiar type of emptiness (which requires a peculiar type of snotty audience) I tend to label (perhaps unjustly) as fascist. So I turned to a paperback of E. M. Forster's, Abinger Harvest [New York, 1953] and this, on the contrary, I find charming and alive. And I agree, and I delight in listening, and in agreeing. It is a voice that comforts me, it is a voice of a world to which I still belong and am proud to belong-of humanism and, culturally, of Catholicity. (Yet Gogarty is the Irishman of the two and Forster the English protestant.) I have to be humble to take serious thought in having to say Forster is my kind of person (I hope). |
| Quotation Source | Turning 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. 44 |
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| Link to Merton's Copy |
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