Report from Work

At work . . . I am doing a little better. I mean, I am less tied up in it, more peaceful and more detached. Taking one thing at a time and going over it slowly and patiently (if I can ever be said to do anything slowly and patiently) and forgetting about the other jobs that have to take their turn . . . . I wonder if I will ever be able to do them. If God wills. Meanwhile, for myself, I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude – to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His face.

• Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1956: 26).