Swallowing the Answers: The Letters of Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Merton

Don't resist the impulse

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In 1959 Czeslaw Milosz was living in France, exiled from his native Poland after publishing The Captive Mind—a searing account of life as an artist under totalitarianism. He felt pulled between two worlds: the West and particularly the United States, which offered him asylum and steady work, and Poland, the place he felt he belonged, and the source of his poetic sensibility. Caught in a kind of psychological limbo, he was, in his irascibly independent way, looking for advice. “No one will blame me…for having sought out authorities,” he reflected, remembering an earlier occasion when he accosted Albert Einstein to ask if he should return to Poland (Einstein told him he should). Later that year, he reached out to Thomas Merton.

Merton—already famous in religious circles for his memoir The Seven Story Mountain—had written Milosz a letter the previous year in appreciation of The Captive Mind. Merton seemed to see in Milosz a man similarly troubled and ill at ease with the world, torn between the excesses of the capitalist West and the repression of the totalitarian East. “There has to be a third position, a position of integrity, which refuses subjection to the pressures of the two massive groups ranged against each other in the world,” Merton wrote.

Typically for Merton, his letter evidences a searching intelligence. While The Seven Story Mountain closes with a sense of arrival as he enters the Cistercian Monastery where he spent the remainder of his life, the rest of his bibliography feels restlessly on the move, and his vision of the contemplative life in works like Seeds of Contemplation is characterized by a skepticism of self-satisfaction. “One thing I do know,” he writes in this first letter to Milosz, “is that anyone who is interested in God Who is Truth, has to break out of the ready-made shells of the ‘captive’ positions that offer their convenient escapes from freedom—one who loves freedom must go through the painful experience of seeking it, perhaps without success.”