Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

In considering the Merton literary output, one is amazed by the sheer quantity of it. That a monk, whose daily life was fairly rigorously regulated by a monastic routine that gave him only limited time for writing, should produce more than forty books and some sixty or more journals and reading notebooks, a thousand pages of poetry and...