Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Thomas Merton's Journal The Sign of Jonas is a record of his growing awareness of what it means to be a monk, yet beyond that the text suggests what it means to be so while also a writer. Merton's journal records various attempts to minimize an awareness of his incipient vocation as a man of letters, but finally...