My Argument with the Gestapo by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton [Merton, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81985-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Such are the complications that disentangle themselves from any train of thought beginning with the time Aunt Melissa stood in front of the fireplace, in the London flat, and told me where to look for a room in Strasbourg.

Siga, hombre, escriba lo que piensa! Other occasions!

It is my eighteenth birthday. There is a little sun. I ride back in the bus from Dulwich, where Uncle Rafe sent me to see a man who would tell me where to find rooms in Italy, where to live for very little in Rome, would tell me who to see, would give me letters of introduction. My pockets are full of careful information in his handwriting, and of letters. In my pocket, also, are my passport, my tickets, and the letters from Uncle Rafe to people in the South of France.

Whenever I went in the high-roofed taxis to get the boat train at Victoria, I went with letters in my pockets and ideas, given me by Uncle Rafe and his friends.

Look, I still carry, eight years afterwards, the wallet Uncle Rafe gave me for a present. It was the best wallet I ever saw, from Finlay’s, in Bond Street.

On my eighteenth birthday, this wallet is new, and smells fine, and is full of tickets to Italy.

The evening of the day I am eighteen, we have dinner at the Café Royal, we see a film, we go to the Café Anglais, maybe we have some champagne. I have never forgotten it.

The next day, I take the boat train.

In Uncle Rafe’s flat I did not have to pretend to admire the things I thought were ridiculous, and did not have to pretend to disparage the things I admired.

When I walked with him in the street, I did not have to make respectful double-talk about horses, or the Prince of Wales, or good sound red-faced girls as grim as cabbage, or Church of England parsons, or British woolens, or mixed hockey, or the Prime Minister, or quaint cockney humor, or motorcars, or golf.

There was no necessity to pretend to be in favor of Bournemouth or Weston super Mare. I was not obliged to pay reverence to St. Pancras Station, or the late Queen, or Georgian poets, or Rudyard Kipling, or the Morning Post. It was not essential to believe that, without the presence of the sensible English, India would fall to pieces and all the ignorant natives would simply die.

I did not have to conceal my belief that Picasso and Matisse and Cézanne were not crazy, were not trying to fool the suspicious millionaires, but were good artists. I did not have to pretend Blake was less of a poet than Matthew Arnold or that I liked Browning one bit.

Supposing I made a list of the things that I heard of, first of all, from Uncle Rafe? It would be very long.

It would be made up of the names of books, of painters, of cities, of kinds of wine, of curious facts about all the people in the world, about races and about languages and about writing.

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