Un Success Full

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / January 26, 2017

Thomas Merton was asked once to contribute to a book on success — specifically a statement of how he’d achieved it in his own life.

I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had meaning to me. If it happened that I had once written a best-seller this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté and I would take very good care never to do the same thing again. If I had a message for my contemporaries it was surely this: be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.

Merton “heard no more” from his interlocutor and was “not aware that my reply was published.”

Photo: Jonathan Williams
“Portrait of Thomas Merton”
Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, N.C.

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Bread

“We’re sorry,” said the man, pointing. “We ain’t much here.” The woman, they guessed his wife by the way she puttered around, doing many small things but nothing really, was shaking her head. The two were indicating the table, which indeed was sparse: bread of some kind, though it looked fresh baked at least, with

Too Old For This

You know the line. Usually spoken by an ersatz Bruce Willis type, it is well past cliché, sliding in safely but awkwardly beyond its years to self-parody, as predictable as the pablum in which it appears. [And note, I like every other Die Hard movie.] And yet, here I am: Too old for this. I

Ark Of The Christian Life

Not God is the phrase they use in AA for realizing we are, well … not God. And no, I’m not an alcoholic. No really — I’m not. Not God is also the answer to the question, WTF? What is wrong with people, this place, my parents, and our upbringing, education, choices and decisions, and probably

Animal Planet

We’re watching Planet of the Apes. No, not the Charlton Heston one — this one. Only it’s supposed to be this one, from last year. So we’re on the middle one, the “first remake” (excluding the 17 sequels to the Charlton Heston one) and it’s by Tim Burton, with all that that entails, from Helena

In The Heart of the Drunkard

And away he went, to drink the value of his cross … I have been listening to Fyodor Dostoevski’s The Idiot on the iPhone, from Audible.com. It’s incredible. I just know I’ll have to read it as soon as I’m done with the audio. [I do irk myself somewhat on having become such a fan

You Da Man

A Good Friday And petulant Pilate as if triumphant — What I have written, I have written! Finally a decision.

All Things Considered

This could go a couple different ways. An image likes could be Veteran’s Day, it’s not, or Memorial Day which, though closer, it’s not. Could be about a song (actually a poem) I found only a few months ago or an automatically somber meditation on mortality that’s begun before you’ve even begun to read …

Do Piece — Anger (Buechner)

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving

Adore and obey