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April 24, 2007
Tuesday is for Thomas
Merton wrote:
Yesterday I was sitting in the woodshed reading and little wren suddenly hopped up onto my shoulder and then onto the corner of the book while I was reading and paused a second to take a look at me before flying away.
There is something you cannot know about a wren by cutting it open in a laboratory and that you can know only if it remains fully and completely a wren, itself, and hops on your shoulder if it feels like it.
A tame animal is already invested with a certain falsity by its tameness. By becoming what we want it to be, it takes a disguise that we decided to impose upon it.
I want not only to observe but to know living things, and this implies a dimension of primordial familiarity that is simple and primitive and religious and poor. This is the reality I need, the vestige of God in His creatures.
Posted by joshuacase at April 24, 2007 08:29 AM