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Thomas Merton's Autobiography, My Impressions

  There are a few popular Catholic writers who I just can’t get into. One is St. John Henry Newman. I’ve always found his prose too difficult to enjoy. Similarly, though I appreciate Dante, I’ve always struggled through the Divine Comedy. Obviously, this is subjective to my experience.  When I started reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain over two years ago, I wondered if I was going to have a repeat of the experience I’d had with Newman. I was surprised by how boring his book was. I wondered how such a long and unexciting book had inspired so many young men to join the Trappists. His early childhood story of being orphaned wasn’t even that compelling to me, nor was his toe-infection. His wanderings around the earth with his artist father had been confusing, but his college years proved the hardest to follow. I couldn’t keep up with all the names and details. None of the characters seemed to have much flesh and blood to them. The whole thing seemed fairly abstracted.  Worse, M
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The Big Bad Wolf

(A story) I’m a neurotic person and I have undiagnosed mental and physical ailments, of that I’m sure. My understanding of existence is a complicated squiggle for other people; it's straight, parallel lines.  But thank God for my shrink. I should watch out, thanking God like that isn’t like me. Anyways, I’m thankful for my psychiatrist because he keeps the big bad wolf away from the door. Well, he keeps it away for as long as it can be kept away because that isn’t of course for forever. Sooner or later the big bad wolf will come to gobble us all up.  My psychiatrist asked me to keep a diary of my day so this will be the first entry. I’m writing now at 8:30 pm, 1987. It’s dark outside but the sun has just gone down on a beautiful spring day in San Francisco, wow doesn’t that sound poetic? I’m a lucky man to live in San Francisco.  Life my friend isn’t a story like the cinemas or even the books. It’s just life. It doesn’t really tell a story with a real beginning and an end. Sure I b
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Haruki Murakami The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Impressions

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I finally read a modern-day classic and can share a few thoughts on it. First of all, it seems like the book illustrates a kind of modern mood. The mood is one of detachment and involvement in life. The main character, Toru, is connected to two characters through the stories they tell in the novel. Both of these characters are from the Japanese war and both of them illustrate well the modern preoccupation with freewill vs human predetermination. The war is a powerful means of illustrating human punniness.  There is also plenty of symbolism in the book. It's difficult to quite nail down the symbolism of the Windup Bird; it is certainly an image of mechanism and absurdity. Yet it also seems to express some kind of beauty. The windup bird is an important part of one of the war stories. It plays a role in connecting the war stories to Toru's life, suggesting to us that the same kind of determinism(lack of free will) exists in Toru's world. At the same time, the author gives u
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