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.

The nature of art and the relationship of the artist to society were a continuing interest of Merton's from the time of his M.A. thesis on William Blake, which turned out to be an informal and stimulating discussion of aesthetics. Antecedent to his curiosity about the nature of art was his consciousness of the artist's role in...