A recent book about Thomas Merton highlights his illicit six-month affair with a young woman. Garry Wills calls the tryst between the fifty-one-year-old Trappist celebrity monk and the twenty-five-year-old woman an instance of “shallow calling to shallow.”
Merton wrote from his “monastic solitude”: “I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s, and it haunts me.” In his poems to her, he would write of their “worshipping hands” and how “I cling to the round hull / Of your hips.”
