Books like The silent life by Thomas Merton

A personal collection of Thomas Merton’s prayers drawn from his journals, letters, poetry, and books, paired with 100 rare Zen‑style pen-and-ink drawings.

Thomas Merton’s classic guide blends Western mysticism and Eastern monastic traditions to show how contemplative prayer brings inner peace that can transform contemporary life.

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.

By 1952, Thomas Merton's renown as the bestselling author of The Seven Storey Mountain was well established. During the years illuminated by this third volume of his private journals, Merton struggled to reconcile his celebrity with his desire for a life of hermetic silence and contemplation. Already at the Abbey of Gethsemani for over a decade, Merton was beginning to grow impatient with the strictures and shortcomings of conventional monastic life. Here he chronicles the search for a more authentic experience of the divine and of community that led him to explore Zen, existentialism, and the exciting developments in Latin American Christianity and literature, which informed his own Catholic spirituality and his views of the great intellectual debates of his time. Merton's private writing combines a poet's eye for the beauty of nature - in the woods and fields of the Abbey - as well as a fiction writer's instinct for the idiosyncracies of his brethren, the rhythms and tediums of regular observance, the strengths of the monastery and its weaknesses. It is, however, Merton's restless, compelling, unvarnished reflections on the question of what it means to be a monk in his own time that gives this journal its most lasting value, paying homage to monasticism and instructing all who value the contemplative life.