Description
The Wisdom of the Desert used to be one in all Thomas Merton’s favorites among his own books―definitely because he had was hoping to spend his last years as a hermit.
The private tones of the translations, the blend of reverence and humor so characteristic of him, show how deeply Merton identified with the legendary authors of those sayings and parables, the fourth-century Christian Fathers who sought solitude and contemplation within the deserts of the Near East.
The hermits of Screte who turned their backs on a corrupt society remarkably like our own had much in commonplace with the Zen masters of China and Japan, and Father Merton made his selection from them with an eye to the type of affect produced by the Zen mondo.