title: Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom (The Journals of Thomas Merton Vol. 6)
author:  Thomas Merton 
description: "It is said that when Emily Dickinson sent her first submission of poems to the essayist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she included a question for Higginson: "Do these verses breathe?" Higginson's response was presumably affirmative. I imagine a similar question posed by Merton: "Does my journal breathe?" To which I heartily respond, "Yes." -- <i>Anna J. Brown <i>America</i></i><br /><br />"What one finds in Mertons' writings...is this discharge of the authentic self....What shines through in his writings and he never seemed to stop writing... is the luminous humanity of a devotion to the journey." -- <i>Toronta <i>Globe and Mail</i> </i><br /><br />
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  The Hidden Ground of L 
  
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  THE 
  HIDDEN GROUND 
  OF LOVE 
  The Letters of 
  THOMAS MERTON 
  on Religious Experience 
  and Social Concerns 
  selected and edited by 
  William H. Shannon 
  Farrar • Straus • Giroux 
  NEW YORK 
  
  Copyright © 1985 by the Merton Legacy Trust 
  All rights reserved / First printing, 1985 
  Printed in the United States of America 
  Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto 
  Designed by Cynthia Krupat 
  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 
  Merton, Thomas, 1915-1968. / The hidden ground of love. 
  . Merton, Thomas, 1915-1968 . 2. Trappists—United States—Correspondence. 
  I. Shannon, William Henry. II. Title. 
  BX4705 .M542A275 1985 271'.125'024 84-26045 
  
  Preface 
  Letters are valuable and entertaining in proportion to the wit and ability, and 
  above all the imprudence, of those who write them. Honest letters are more 
  informative, more amusing, more pathetic, more vital than any considered au¬ 
  tobiography . Of all docum