title: Thomas Merton and the Noonday Demon: The Camaldoli Correspondence
author: Donald Grayston
description: ''Grayston offers an excellent example of work that emerges when disciplined scholarship, seasoned experience, and refined pastoral awareness are free to converge and collaborate in the creative mind of a writer. <i>Thomas Merton and the Noonday Demon</i> both informs and transforms the reader with a pilgrimage that begins with the unexpected discovery of letters in a Camaldolese monastery and goes deep into the most challenging terrain of Merton's spiritual journey . . . and our own.''<br />--David Joseph Belcastro, President of the International Thomas Merton Society<br /><br />''This book presents a thorough, engaging, and enlightening study of Merton's major periods of instability resulting from his desire for greater solitude . . . Through this marvelous piece of scholarship, the reader will gain new and fascinating insights into the life, vocation, and struggles of this great twentieth-century spiritual master.''<br />--Paul M. Pearson, Director of the Thomas Merton Center<br /><br />''Donald Grayston's sensitive, inquisitive, and probing examination of the spiritual disorder at the heart of Merton's restiveness is a gallimaufry, a rich mosaic of psychologically penetrative insights, a tantalizing portrait of a modern gyrovague's disquiet, a potpourri of snippets and shards of sapiential quality.''<br />--Michael Higgins, Vice President for Mission and Catholic Identity, Sacred Heart University<br /><br />''Scholarly, accessible, relevant. Grayston unpacks the complex tale told in this hitherto unknown correspondence from a critical period in Merton's life and shows us yet again the human fallibility that somehow gives Merton greater not less appeal and relevance to the contemporary reader. As we see Merton struggle with his questions about 'vocation' and the 'will of God,' we find ourselves also being drawn into those same questions in our own lives.''<br />--Angus Stuart, Past Chair of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland<br /><br />''Grayston brings together the complexities and paradoxes of Merton's spiritual restlessness, desire for solitude, and late, romantic relationship with his nurse. The credibility of Grayston's work is sustained through an impressive and detailed use of sources, some of them new to Merton readers. Grayston writes with considerable verve and originality and with a readiness to make judgments where they are needed.'' <br />--Ross Labrie, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia --Wipf and Stock Publishers
zlib_text: Mcr. 
  iflOOt 
  
  THOMAS 
  MERTON 
  THOUGHTS 
  IN 
  SOLITUDE 
  NEW YORK 
  FARRAR, STRAUS & CUDAHY 
  
  COPYRIGHT © 1956, 1958 
  by the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani 
  Library of Congress catalog card No. 58-8817 
  Design: Enrico Amo 
  First Printing, 1958 
  Published simultaneously in Canada by Ambassador Books, 
  Ltd., Toronto, Canada 
  Manufactured in the United States of America 
  by American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York 
  
  Ex Parte Ordinis 
  NIHIL obstat: 
  Fr. M. Paul Bourne, O.C.S.O. 
  Fr. M. Thomas Aquinas Porter, O.C.S.O. 
  IMPRIMI POTEST: 
  Fr. M. Gabriel Sortais, O.C.S.O. 
  Abbot General 
  Rome, August 17,1956 
  nihil obstat: 
  John A. Good wine, Censor Librorum 
  imprimatur: 
  Francis Cardinal Spellman, 
  Archbishop of New York 
  New York, February 28,1958 
  The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are official declara¬ 
  tions that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or 
  moral error. No implication is contained therein that 
  those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Impri¬ 
  matur agree with the content