Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal [person] accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, and the office of the monk or the marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life.
Thomas Merton. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart and James Laughlin, editors. New York: New Directions Press, 1969: 306.
Thought for the Day
We realize very keenly in American today [October, 1968] that the monk is essentially outside all establishments. He [or she] does not belong to an establishment. He [or she] is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience.
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton: 305.
