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.

Thomas Merton has always occupied a special place in the American Catholic Church, though for different reasons at different times. His first acclaim came with his conversion, recorded in The Seven Storey Mountain. At that time, before ecumenism was much heard of, the convert was a special kind of hero, celebrated, publicized, and taken as living proof that...