Personal Life and Death
According to The Seven Storey Mountain, the youthful Merton loved jazz but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but peaceful music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave Gethsemani for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, mainly in Louisville or New York.
In April 1966, Merton underwent a surgical procedure to treat debilitating back pain. While recuperating in a Louisville hospital, he fell in love with a student nurse assigned to his care. He wrote poems to her and reflected on the relationship in "A Midsummer Diary for M." Merton struggled to maintain his vows while being deeply in love with the woman he referred to in his personal diary as "M". He remained chaste, never consummating the relationship. After ending the relationship, he recommitted himself to his vows.
On December 10, 1968, Merton had gone to attend an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks in suburban Bangkok, Thailand. While stepping out of his bath, he reached out to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire and was accidentally electrocuted. He died 27 years to the day after his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941. His body was flown back to the United States and he is buried at Gethsemani Abbey.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Merton
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freest country on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)