"Up with the revolution of tulips. Tulips are not important, they are essential. Yes, sing. Love and Peace, silence, movement of planets."For those who don't know him, Thomas Merton (1915-68) was a Trappist monk, a poet and a social activist best known for his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, which for many decades brought huge numbers of young men (and, no doubt, women) into lives of spiritual contemplation all across America and beyond.
I've long had a passion for Catholic transcendentalist writers (St Teresa of Avila is my pin-up girl) and love books about nuns and monks.
I can't pretend that The Seven Storey Mountain was my favourite of these (you'll have to go a long way to beat Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate), but for some reason I stuck with Merton, and my patience has been rewarded a thousandfold.
He's the only writer I read pretty much every day. There's a small Book of Hours that never fails to inspire me.
The main thing that's so wonderful about him is his love of nature and his ebullience.
And his need to constantly interrogate himself.
And his extraordinary humility.
And his exquisite facility with language.
As soon as you start reading him, you find yourself transported to the wooden porch of his hermitage in Gethsemani, Kentucky.
It is night-time.
The crickets roar.
You are perched on an uncomfortably comfortable stool, watching the fireflies flit through the darkness.
"Lord God of this great night," Merton sighs, "do you see the woods?
"Do you hear the rumour of their loneliness?
"Do you behold their secrecy?
"Do you remember their solitudes? Do you see that my soul is beginning to dissolve like wax within me?"