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.

"All innocence is a matter of belief." Thomas Merton said, "For the poet there is no magic. There is only life in all its unpredictability and freedom." Merton was the unpredictable apostle of freedom, a monk in the grand tradition who would be at home with his great medieval predecessors, men who in their time also upset prelates...