The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

by Thomas Merton

  I have no doubt that there was a certain amount of conflict between the two generations when Father and Mother determined that they were going to find their own kind of a house and live in it. It was a small house, very old and rickety, standing under two or three high pine trees, in Flushing, Long Island, which was then a country town. We were out in the fields in the direction of Kiljordan and Jamaica and the old Truant School. The house had four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs, and two of the rooms were barely larger than closets. It must have been very cheap.

  Our landlord, Mr. Duggan, ran a nearby saloon. He got in trouble with Father for helping himself to the rhubarb which we were growing in the garden. I remember the grey summer dusk in which this happened. We were at the supper table, when the bended Mr. Duggan was observed, like some whale in the sea of green rhubarb, plucking” up the red stalks. Father rose to his feet and hastened out into the garden. I could hear indignant words. We sat at the supper table, silent, not eating, and when Father returned I began to question him, and to endeavour to work out the morality of the situation. And I still remember it as having struck me as a difficult case, with much to be said on both sides. In fact, I had assumed that if the landlord felt like it, he could simply come and harvest all our vegetables, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mention this with the full consciousness that someone will use it against me, and say that the real reason I became a monk in later years was that I had the mentality of a medieval serf when I was barely out of the cradle.

  Father did as much painting as he could. He filled several sketch books and finished some water-colors along the waterfront in New York, and eventually even had an exhibition in a place in Flushing which was maintained by some artists there. Two doors away from us, up the road, in a white house with pointed gables, surrounded by a wide sweep of sloping lawn, and with a stable that had been turned into a studio, lived Bryson Burroughs, who painted pale, classical pictures something like Puvis de Chavannes and who, with some of the gentleness you could see in his work, was very kind to us.

  Father could not support us by painting. During the war years we lived on his work as a landscape gardener: which was mostly plain manual labor, for he not only laid out the gardens of some rich people in the neighborhood, but did most of the work planting and caring for them: and that was how we lived. Father did not get this money under false pretenses. He was a very good gardener, understood flowers, and knew how to make things grow. What is more, he liked this kind of work almost as much as painting.

  Then in November 1918, about a week before the Armistice of that particular World War, my younger brother was born. He was a child with a much serener nature than mine, with not so many obscure drives and impulses. I remember that everyone was impressed by his constant and unruffled happiness. In the long evenings, when he was put to bed before the sun went down, instead of protesting and fighting, as I did when I had to go to bed, he would lie upstairs in his crib, and we would hear him singing a little tune. Every evening it was the same tune, very simple, very primitive; a nice little tune, very suitable for the time of day and for the season. Downstairs, we would all fall more or less silent, lulled by the singing of the child in the crib, and we would see the sunrays slanting across the fields and through the windows as the day ended.

  I had an imaginary friend, called Jack, who had an imaginary dog, called Doolittle. The chief reason why I had an imaginary friend was that there were no other children to play with, and my brother John Paul was still a baby. When I tried to seek diversion watching the gentlemen who played pool at Mr. Duggan’s saloon, I got into much trouble. On the other hand, I could go and play at Burroughs’ place, in their garden and in the room full of old lumber over the studio. Betty Burroughs knew how to join in games in a way that did not imply patronage, though she was practically grown up. But for friends of my own age, I had to fall back on my imagination, and it was perhaps not a good thing.

  Mother did not mind the company I kept in my imagination, at least to begin with, but once I went shopping with her, and refused to cross Main Street, Flushing, for fear that the imaginary dog, Doolittle, might get run over by real cars. This I later learned from her record of the affair in her diary.

  By 1920 I could read and write and draw. I drew a picture of the house, and everybody sitting under the pine trees, on a blanket, on the grass, and sent it to Pop in the mail. He lived at Douglaston, which was about five miles away. But most of the time I drew pictures of boats. Ocean liners with many funnels and hundreds of portholes, and waves all around as jagged as a saw, and the air full of “v’s” for the sea-gulls.

  Things were stimulated by the momentous arrival of my New Zealand grandmother, who had come from the Antipodes to visit her scattered children in England and America, as soon as the war had ended. I think she brought one of my aunts along with her, but I was most of all impressed by Granny. She must have talked to me a great deal, and asked me many questions and told me a great number of things, and though there are few precise details I remember about that visit, the general impression she left was one of veneration and awe—and love. She was very good and kind, and there was nothing effusive and overwhelming about her affection. I have no precise memory of what she looked like, except that she wore dark clothes, grey and dark brown, and had glasses and grey hair and spoke quietly and earnestly. She had been a teacher, like her husband, my New Zealand grandfather.

  The clearest thing I remember about her was the way she put salt on her oatmeal at breakfast. Of this I am certain: it made a very profound impression on me. Of one other thing I am less certain, but it is in itself much more important: she taught me the Lord’s Prayer. Perhaps I had been taught to say the “Our Father” before, by my earthly father. I never used to say it. But evidently Granny asked me one night if I had said my prayers, and it turned out that I did not know the “Our Father,” so she taught it to me. After that I did not forget it, even though I went for years without saying it at all.

  It seems strange that Father and Mother, who were concerned almost to the point of scrupulosity about keeping the minds of their sons uncontaminated by error and mediocrity and ugliness and sham, had not bothered to give us any formal religious training. The only explanation I have is the guess that Mother must have had strong views on the subject. Possibly she considered any organized religion below the standard of intellectual perfection she demanded of any child of hers. We never went to church in Flushing.

  In fact, I remember having an intense desire to go to church one day, but we did not go. It was Sunday. Perhaps it was an Easter Sunday, probably in 1920. From across the fields, and beyond the red farmhouse of our neighbor, I could see the spire of St. George’s church, above the trees. The sound of the churchbells came to us across the bright fields. I was playing in front of the house, and stopped to listen. Suddenly, all the birds began to sing in the trees above my head, and the sound of birds singing and churchbells ringing lifted up my heart with joy. I cried out to my father:

  “Father, all the birds are in their church.”

  And then I said: “Why don’t we go to church?”

  My father looked up and said: “We will.”

  “Now?” said I.

  “No, it is too late. But we will go some other Sunday.”

  And yet Mother did go somewhere, sometimes, on Sunday mornings, to worship God. I doubt that Father went with her; he probably stayed at home to take care of me and John Paul, for we never went. But anyway, Mother went to the Quakers, and sat with them in their ancient meeting house. This was the only kind of religion for which she had any use, and I suppose it was taken for granted that, when we grew older, we might be allowed to tend in that direction too. Probably no influence would have been brought to bear on us to do so. We would have been left to work it out more or less for ourselves.

  Meanwhile, at home, my education was progressing along the lines laid down by some progressive method that Mother had read about in one of those magazines. She ans
wered an advertisement that carried an oval portrait of some bearded scholar with a pince-nez, and received from Baltimore a set of books and some charts and even a small desk and blackboard. The idea was that the smart modern child was to be turned loose amid this apparatus, and allowed to develop spontaneously into a midget university before reaching the age of ten.

  The ghost of John Stuart Mill must have glided up and down the room with a sigh of gratification as I opened the desk and began. I forget what came of it all, except that one night I was sent to bed early for stubbornly spelling “which” without the first “h”: “w-i-c-h.” I remember brooding about this as an injustice. “What do they think I am, anyway?” After all, I was still only five years old.

  Still, I retain no grudge against the fancy method or the desk that went with it. Maybe that was where my geography book came from—the favorite book of my childhood. I was so fond of playing prisoner’s base all over those maps that I wanted to become a sailor. I was only too eager for the kind of foot-loose and unstable life I was soon to get into.

  My second best book confirmed me in this desire. This was a collection of stories called the Greek Heroes. It was more than I could do to read the Victorian version of these Greek myths for myself, but Father read them aloud, and I learned of Theseus and the Minotaur, of the Medusa, of Perseus and Andromeda. Jason sailed to a far land, after the Golden Fleece. Theseus returned victorious, but forgot to change the black sails, and the King of Athens threw himself down from the rock, believing that his son was dead. In those days I learned the name Hesperides, and it was from these things that I unconsciously built up the vague fragments of a religion and of a philosophy, which remained hidden and implicit in my acts, and which, in due time, were to assert themselves in a deep and all-embracing attachment to my own judgement and my own will and a constant turning away from subjection, towards the freedom of my own ever-changing horizons.

  In a sense, this was intended as the fruit of my early training. Mother wanted me to be independent, and not to run with the herd. I was to be original, individual, I was to have a definite character and ideals of my own. I was not to be an article thrown together, on the common bourgeois pattern, on everybody else’s assembly line.

  If we had continued as we had begun, and if John Paul and I had grown up in that house, probably this Victorian-Greek complex would have built itself up gradually, and we would have turned into good-mannered and earnest sceptics, polite, intelligent, and perhaps even in some sense useful. We might have become successful authors, or editors of magazines, professors at small and progressive colleges. The way would have been all smooth and perhaps I would never have ended up as a monk.

  But it is not yet the time to talk about that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfilment of my mother’s ideas for me—the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development.

  But oh, how many possibilities there were ahead of me and my brother in that day! A brand-new conscience was just coming into existence as an actual, operating function of a soul. My choices were just about to become responsible. My mind was clean and unformed enough to receive any set of standards, and work with the most perfect of them, and work with grace itself, and God’s own values, if I had ever had the chance.

  Here was a will, neutral, undirected, a force waiting to be applied, ready to generate tremendous immanent powers of light or darkness, peace or conflict, order or confusion, love or sin. The bias which my will was to acquire from the circumstances of all its acts would eventually be the direction of my whole being towards happiness or misery, life or death, heaven or hell.

  More than that: since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.

  I think it must have been after Mother went to the hospital that, one Sunday, I went to the Quaker meeting house with Father. He had explained to me that the people came and sat there, silent, doing nothing, saying nothing, until the Holy Spirit moved someone to speak. He also told me that a famous old gentleman, who was one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, would be there. That was Dan Beard. Consequently I sat among the Quakers with three more or less equal preoccupations running through my mind. Where was Dan Beard? Would he not only be called beard, but have one on his chin? And what was the Holy Spirit going to move all these people to do or say?

  I forget how the third question was answered. But after the man sitting in the high wooden rostrum, presiding over the Quakers, gave the signal that the meeting was ended, I saw Dan Beard among the people under the low sunny porch, outside the meeting-house door. He had a beard.

  It was almost certainly in the last year or so of Mother’s life, 1921, that Father got a job as organist at the Episcopalian church in Douglaston. It was not a job that made him very happy or enthusiastic. He did not get along very well with the minister. But I began to go to the church on Sundays, which makes me think that Mother was in the hospital, because I must have been living with Pop and Bonnemaman in Douglaston.

  The old Zion church was a white wooden building, with a squat, square little belfry, standing on a hill, surrounded by high trees and a large graveyard, and in a crypt underneath it were buried the original Douglas family, who had settled there on the shore of the Sound some hundred years before. It was pleasant enough on Sundays. I remember the procession that came out of the sacristy, a choir of men and women, dressed in black, with white surplices, and led by a Cross. There were stained glass windows up behind the altar, one had an anchor on it, for its design, which interested me because I wanted to go to sea, and travel all over the world. Strange interpretation of a religious symbol ordinarily taken to signify stability in Hope: the theological virtue of Hope, dependence on God. To me it suggested just the opposite. Travel, adventure, the wide sea, and unlimited possibilities of human heroism, with myself as the hero.

  Then there was a lectern, shaped like an eagle with outspread wings, on which rested a huge Bible. Nearby was an American flag, and above that was one of those little boards they have in Protestant churches, on which the numbers of the hymns to be sung are indicated by black and white cards. I was impressed by the lighting of candles on the altar, by the taking up of the collection, and by the singing of hymns, while Father, hidden behind the choir somewhere, played the organ.

  One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done, and that was all I knew about it. And now, as I consider it after many years, I see that it was very good that I should have got at least that much of religion in my childhood. It is a law of man’s nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity.

  At this same time my father played the piano every evening in a small movie theater which had been opened in the next town, Bayside. We certainly needed money.

  III

  AND PROBABLY THE CHIEF REASON WHY WE NEEDED MONEY was that Mother had cancer of the stomach.

  That was another thing that was never explained to me. Everything about sickness and death was more or less kept hidden from me, because consideration of these things might make a child morbid. And since I was destined to grow up with a nice, clear
, optimistic, and well-balanced outlook on life, I was never even taken to the hospital to see Mother, after she went there. And this was entirely her own idea.

  How long she had been ill and suffering, still keeping house for us, not without poverty and hardship, without our knowing anything of what it was, I cannot say. But her sickness probably accounts for my memory of her as thin and pale and rather severe.

  With a selfishness unusual even in a child, I was glad to move from Flushing to my grandparents’ house at Douglaston. There I was allowed to do more or less as I pleased, there was plenty of food, and we had two dogs and several cats to play with. I did not miss Mother very much, and did not weep when I was not allowed to go and see her. I was content to run in the woods with the dogs, or climb trees, or pester the chickens, or play around in the clean little studio where Bonnemaman sometimes painted china, and fired it in a small kiln.

  Then one day Father gave me a note to read. I was very surprised. It was for me personally, and it was in my mother’s handwriting. I don’t think she had ever written to me before—there had never been any occasion for it. Then I understood what was happening, although, as I remember, the language of the letter was confusing to me. Nevertheless, one thing was quite evident. My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again.