Ascension

Monday, January 29, 1968

It has been unseasonably warm for January, in the fifties all weekend—hardly enough for a jacket. In downtown Louisville, the day is bright, with only a few clouds, so there’s no reason not to take a quick stroll before visiting a convalescing friend and heading back to the abbey. And anyway, he needs to shake off that aura of mortification that clings to you after a visit to the proctologist, “with your head down and your asshole up in the air,” as he later wrote in his journal.¹

Just down the street, at the corner of Preston and Broadway, is Vine Records, with its shop sign showing a stylized saxophone in place of the V in Vine. He’s got money in his pocket, and his fifty-third birthday is only two days away, so why not take a peek? An indulgence, but it’s not as though Dom James is still looking over his shoulder.

Inside, one of the first things that catches his eye is the new-releases rack, which displays a Bob Dylan record he’s never seen, John Wesley Harding. The grainy black-and-white photo on the cover shows a bearded Dylan standing with three men, two of whom seem to be foreign—East Indians, maybe. And, oddly, Dylan is smiling. In all the other photos he’s seen, Dylan is grimly poker-faced. He flips the record over and finds one of Dylan’s typically surreal ramblings, which begins somewhat cheerily, “There were three kings and a jolly three too. . . .” It’s encouraging to know that Dylan’s recovered from the accident. As he tucks the album under his arm, he realizes this is the first Dylan record he’s purchased rather than borrowed.

He checks the jazz bins. He’s heard the flap about jazz’s “New Thing”—by pioneers like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Charles Mingus. They’re shaking things up right now, which is just what this society could use.

He stops at a Coltrane LP. The front cover shows the saxophonist sitting on a stool against a white background, soprano sax in hand, gazing into the distance like some Nubian prophet. John Coltrane is printed in black, and above it, in vivid multi-colors, is the album’s title, Ascension. He flips the cover over. No tracks are listed, just photos of the musicians and an endorsement from poet LeRoi Jones: “Trane is now a scope of feeling. A more fixed traveler, whose wildest onslaughts are gorgeous artifacts not even deaf people should miss.” Impressive. He takes the records to the sales desk.

In a world hell-bent on destroying itself, perhaps Bob Dylan and John Coltrane can offer some perspective.2

•••

The first words Thomas Merton wrote in his journal in 1968 were “The year struggles with its own blackness.”³ The recent deaths of so many friends helped to inspire such forebodings about the New Year—forebodings that proved prophetic, since 1968 turned out to be one of the most tumultuous in American history, a genuine annus horribilis.

It would be the year in which nearly seventeen thousand Americans would be killed in Vietnam, more than in any other year of the war, and the year in which American soldiers would massacre five hundred unarmed civilians at My Lai. It would be the year in which riots would erupt in more than a hundred cities across America after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the progressive movement would falter with the assassination of presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, who would be shot at point-blank range while campaigning. It would be the year in which police would beat student protesters bloody on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention, and Richard M. Nixon would be elected president. In other parts of the world, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland would begin, and it would be the second year of the war-induced famine in Biafra during which three million people would eventually starve to death.

Although distracted by the lengthy process of electing Dom James’s replacement as abbot (Merton’s friend and fellow hermit Father Flavian Burns was eventually chosen), Merton was profoundly troubled by the news of the world. It would dominate his journals and letters more than at any other time in his life.

At the end of January, he learned of the Pueblo Incident, in which North Korean ships commandeered an American spy vessel, killing one sailor and capturing the crew of eighty-three. Reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the incident left the nation wondering whether the US was on the verge of another war. That the country was on high alert was personally evident to Merton, for on January 31, his fifty-third birthday, the earth rumbled beneath his feet and the windows of the hermitage rattled as the Army gunners at Fort Knox, thirty miles away, held artillery practice. “Will there never be any peace in our lifetime?” he wrote in his journal that day. “Really, what is ahead but the apocalypse?”4

•••

Often in times of crisis, Merton sought out prophetic voices to put things into perspective—poets and novelists and theologians. Now, at the beginning of 1968, he tried reading several such writers—William Styron, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Buber, among others—but none of them quite held his attention. The world seemed too unsettled.

To give context to the times, Merton decided to encourage new prophetic voices on his own by starting a literary magazine. It was a bare-bones affair, typed on a simple typewriter and mimeographed at the abbey. The four issues were published throughout the first half of 1968 and called, appropriately, Monk’s Pond. While the production was humble, the caliber of the contributors was not. They included some of the most brilliant writers of the time, many of whom Merton knew personally, people like Nicanor Parra, Mark Van Doren, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, Jack Kerouac, Wendell Berry, Robert Lax, and dozens of others.

The two records that Merton had purchased in Louisville for his birthday also helped to put the chaotic times in perspective. They were prophetic in their own way. Merton relished Dylan’s newest album, John Wesley Harding, most likely because it was his most self-consciously mystical album to date. In an odd twist, while many pop songwriters were now exploring their own inner Dylan, imitating his surrealism or social concerns, Dylan was exploring the Bible—though as Dylan told an interviewer at the time, “I have always read the Bible.”5 Scholars have tallied more than sixty biblical allusions among the album’s twelve songs⁶—and Merton would certainly have caught many of them. The acoustic songs were mellow, most with dark, brooding undertones, and they spoke keenly to the spiritual hunger of the times. In his journal, Merton declared Dylan’s new album to be “his best. Very encouraging.”⁷

But that album’s impact on Merton was negligible compared to that of the other record. He pronounced John Coltrane’s Ascension to be “shattering. A fantastic and prophetic piece of music.”⁸ Beyond that, Merton didn’t explain, but Coltrane seemed to capture Merton’s feelings at the time. A few months later, when asked to conduct a workshop for some novice masters at the hermitage, Merton considered sharing Coltrane with them as a way to startle them, to wake them up to the state of the world.

•••

Released in 1966, Ascension became a classic of “the New Thing,” which eventually came to be called free jazz. Ahead of its time then as now, Coltrane’s music was so controversial that he was booed on stage in 1965—just weeks after Dylan was booed at Newport. Many critics and fans found Coltrane’s new sound, like Dylan’s, chaotic and grating.

Coltrane’s concept was to create a space in which the musicians were freed from as many constraints as possible, from standard rhythms, keys, tonalities, and chord structures. The ensemble on Ascension consisted of two trumpets, two alto saxes, three tenor saxes (including Coltrane’s), a piano, two basses, and drums. The group recorded only two takes, each about forty minutes long, with the first take being selected and split over the two sides of the album.9 After repeating a short opening theme, the musicians alternated relentlessly dissonant group improvisations with frenzied solos, Coltrane’s main directive being that each solo should increase in volume and intensity as it progressed. So emotionally draining was the session that drummer Elvin Jones, at the end of the second take, hurled his drum kit against the studio wall. He left Coltrane’s band a few months later.

The fact that Merton declared the album “prophetic” was itself prophetic. Few people would have used that word at the time—probably about as many as thought Bob Dylan was a major literary figure. Just as Merton could hear the protest in Dylan’s poetry, he recognized the penetrating social commentary in the instrumental jazz of John Coltrane.

Coltrane may have helped Merton resolve his uneasiness about Cid Corman’s and Joan Baez’s accusations of violence in language. Here was Coltrane, fiercely exploring music’s terra incognita, the farthest reaches of jazz’s possibilities, as a way of saying something important about the nature of society and humanity. While pushing art to its extremes may be perceived as violent by some, it is actually the breaking of new ground—shattering, to use Merton’s word.

Before entering the monastery, Merton had been a jazzophile when the big names were Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, though Merton preferred black artists like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Louis Armstrong. After he became a monk, his relationship with the music grew ambivalent. At times he shunned it as unspiritual, while at other times he speculated that “the more ‘hot’ it is, the more spiritual it seems to be,” at points connecting uninhibited jazz improvisation with religious ecstasy. Still, he added, “none of this can be played long, or make sense for more than a few minutes, anywhere near the monastery.”¹⁰

In late 1957, while having a molar extracted, he sat in the dentist’s chair in a daze, listening to “ancient jazz” piped into the room, music he had once enjoyed. It now made him feel “overcome with a sense of immense hopelessness and defilement.”11 One romantic ballad kept repeating itself in his sleep that night, causing him to wake in a cold sweat.

Three years later, some friends took him to a jazz club in Louisville, and again, his reaction was negative. “I am dead to it,” he wrote. “It is finished long ago. You don’t drag a corpse down to 4th street and set it up in a chair, at a table, and in polite society.”¹²

But by 1968 the world had changed, and so had Merton. World events had forced themselves on him, literally “shaking his windows and rattling his walls,” to paraphrase “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Now, more than ever, Merton was perceiving jazz’s inseparable relationship to the Civil Rights movement, to black empowerment, and to political dissent. Jazz, which had helped the nation survive World War II, had matured and, along with rock ’n’ roll, was in the vanguard of social change. In his 1964 book about the black struggle for civil rights, Seeds of Destruction, Merton wrote, “There is no revolution without poets who are also seers. There is no revolution without prophetic songs. . . . Hence the numinous force of the great and primitive art of the American Negro, a force that makes itself felt precisely where men have lost the habit of looking for art, for instance in that potent and mysterious jazz.”¹³

In February 1968, Merton returned with friends to the jazz clubs in Louisville, but this time he was enthralled.

As with Dylan’s music, Merton would have heard more than just the social context of Coltrane’s free jazz; he would have heard the spiritual content as well. The album’s title, Ascension, a reference to Christ’s ascension to heaven, Merton would have interpreted as Coltrane’s longing to be present with God, so powerfully did the music seem to yearn for transcendence. While most melodic lines in Western music tend to descend in pitch, starting high and moving incrementally lower, Coltrane seems to have coached his session players to do the opposite, to start their improvisations low and move higher—almost as if the musicians were climbing a ladder to heaven. Coltrane considered music a form of prayer and, on his earlier score for A Love Supreme, scratched this note to the musicians: “All paths lead to God.”14

Coltrane’s uncompromising, ecstatic sound validates those who revere him as one of the most mystical figures in jazz. In 1966, a year before Coltrane’s death, an interviewer asked him what he planned to do in the next ten years. Coltrane answered, “Become a saint.”¹⁵ That ambition was fulfilled when he was later elevated to sainthood by the African Orthodox Church, and in the 1980s, one of their congregations in San Francisco renamed their fellowship the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church.

•••

Coltrane’s artistic fearlessness may have emboldened Merton to reassess Cables to the Ace more positively. In February 1968, while he was listening to Coltrane and visiting the jazz clubs, Merton announced in a group newsletter to friends that the book, soon to be issued by New Directions, would most likely baffle them. “It is obscure and indirect,” he wrote almost proudly. “Perhaps some of the younger ones will intuitively pick up some of the short-hand. It does not preach. It does not have a ‘message.’ Maybe most of you better steer clear of it.”¹⁶ By “short-hand,” he may have meant all those Dylanesque poetic devices he used. A few months later, Merton journaled that he wished he had spent more time writing creatively in the mode of Cables and his subsequent book of poetry, The Geography of Lograire, instead of writing so many of his other books, which he deemed “trivial, sanctimonious editorializing.”¹⁷

Like Dylan and Coltrane, Merton was savagely booed in some circles, not before large audiences but in some religious journals. His antiwar writings and his books about Eastern religion drew heavy fire from both inside and outside the church, to the extent that one Catholic layperson burned his books. Some accused him of being a Communist, a radical, and a heretic, and, unbeknown to him, J. Edgar Hoover’s agents at the FBI were diligently amassing a file on him. (This surveillance began ten years earlier when the FBI found that Merton was corresponding with Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago.) How curious that a solitary poet-monk who seldom left rural Kentucky could be regarded as a threat to national security, and yet a threat he was. What Merton had once written about the Desert Fathers was now just as true of himself: they “were in a certain sense ‘anarchists,’ . . . men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state.”18

Though distressed, he deflected the hostility with his customary wit. “I must be Godless,” he wrote in his journal. “I wish to save lives rather than kill commies for Christ.”¹⁹ To poet and monk Robert Lax, his old friend from Columbia, he wrote (in the idiosyncratic jargon the two of them shared), “Frantics are burning my books . . . (have writ to papers, . . . ‘Merton is commie red atheist contra vietnam war pitznik’) . . . Catlick papers all full of turmoil over your friend. / Ho ho ho turmoils. / Ha ha ha burn the books.”²⁰

In April, three days before Palm Sunday, things became too grim for sarcasm. After spending the day at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Merton and a group of friends drove to Lexington for dinner. During the meal, they distractedly watched the day’s news flash across the screen of the restaurant’s television: footage of Vietnam and Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to striking sanitation workers in Memphis. On the night drive back to Gethsemani, a crackling voice on the radio reported first that King had been shot, then that he was in critical condition, and then that he had died. The news was devastating. Merton felt as if “an animal, a beast of the apocalypse,” was crouching on the roof of the car.²¹

In a sad irony, King’s death occasioned the first opportunity for poems by Merton, transformed into songs, to receive national attention. In 1964, a young black singer, Robert Lawrence Williams, had asked Merton to write some poems inspired by African American spirituals, to be used in a tribute to the late President Kennedy. The plan was to have Catholic liturgical composer Alexander Peloquin write folk-gospel settings for them, which Williams would then perform, and the royalties would be donated to a scholarship fund for underprivileged students. But Peloquin’s settings, called Four Freedom Songs, like Niles’s adaptations, turned out to be thoroughly classical, requiring an operatically trained lead singer and an orchestral choir. Merton and Williams were dismayed; the music was too “white,” closer to Carl Orff than to Mahalia Jackson, and before long, wrangling arose over who actually owned the rights: Williams, Peloquin, or Merton.

Despite the controversy, the Four Freedom Songs were later performed by the Ebenezer Baptist Choir (from King’s home church), conducted by the composer, at the National Liturgical Conference in Washington, D.C., as part of a national tribute to King. Catholic social activist Dorothy Day, a friend of Merton’s, was in the audience, and she immediately wrote to him, “The songs were enough to break down the walls of Jericho. People wept with joy.”22

Not long after King’s assassination, Merton learned that Daniel Berrigan was facing criminal charges. In May, Berrigan and eight other Catholic activists stole nearly four hundred files from the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, doused them with napalm, and burned them. On the day that the group burned the files, Berrigan wrote a quick note to Merton; it read simply, “Wish us luck.”²³ The group, dubbed the Catonsville Nine, defined new tactics for the antiwar movement and upped the ante in protests against the government. Berrigan, who evaded capture for a time, ended up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

Then, in June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, which only confirmed in Merton’s mind that murder had become a political tool. After sending a telegram of condolence to Ethel Kennedy, he lamented privately that the country was now headed for “degradation and totalism,” that the “law and order” crowd would be energized—not to prevent more murders, but to crack down on protest and dissent.²⁴

•••

Like monks everywhere, Merton redoubled his efforts to pray for the world. For that to occur, he needed a certain amount of solitude but found it difficult to come by. As Merton confessed in his journal,

Real solitude: I do not have it here. I am not really living as a hermit. I see too many people, have too much active work to do, the place is too noisy, too accessible. People are always coming up here, and I have been too slack about granting visits, interviews, etc., going to town too often, socializing, drinking, and all that. All I have is a certain privacy, but real solitude is less and less possible here. Everyone knows where the hermitage is.25

To deal with the revolving door of visitors, he altered his daily routine—by practicing avoidance. He shifted his writing time to early morning so he could go on extended, prayerful walks among the wooded hills at midday, the time when most visitors knocked on his door. He was not above lurking in the woods, spying from afar, waiting for the intruders to leave. But the tactic was often ineffective.

For more than a year, friends had advised him to travel, to experience the world beyond the abbey. Joan Baez had invited him to her institute. And for years some had suggested that he leave altogether: Ira Sandperl and Rosemary Radford Ruether, as well as Sidi Abdeslam, who had also mysteriously prophesied that a big change was in store for Merton. Even Margie, in their final conversation, implored him to “reach out for happiness” by leaving.²⁶ So, perhaps now was the time—not to leave the order, but to accept invitations to speak. By getting out and speaking up, he thought, perhaps he might do some good.

As a trial, he flew to the Redwoods Monastery in California in May to address a conference of monks and nuns about monastic vocation. For three weeks, friends toured him around the deserts, valleys, and mountains of the Southwest, which left him thoroughly energized. Merton discovered he actually had more solitude while traveling than he had at Gethsemani, and he was inspired by the stimulating people he met.

On May 16 (coincidentally, the day before Daniel Berrigan napalmed the government files in Maryland), Merton found himself in a San Francisco café, sipping espresso with Beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and watching the many attractive women walk past the window.²⁷ Although the two had corresponded for years, this was their first face-to-face meeting, and the experience was invigorating. Merton spent the night in an office-guestroom on an upper floor of Ferlinghetti’s famous City Lights Bookstore.

The trip was decisive. It paved the way for Merton to consider another, far more ambitious journey. Earlier in the year, he had been asked to address an international conference of monastics in December, a meeting organized by the Benedictines, to take place in Bangkok, Thailand. At first he was unsure; he felt it would be one more distraction to what little solitude he had, and he suspected that Father Flavian would be no more encouraging about such things than Dom James had been. So he put the decision on hold. But after the California trip, Father Flavian was willing to let Merton go. So, Merton accepted the invitation to travel to Asia, something he had dreamed of for years.

•••

Merton’s interest in Asia dated back to his days at Columbia, when he started thinking about the differences between the Eastern religions and Catholicism, but his interest intensified while he was at Gethsemani, when he began to see the similarities as well. As a monastic, he was intrigued by the contemplative practices of other religions and avidly studied a wide variety of books on Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Sufism to learn more. With a particular interest in Zen, he corresponded through the years with professor and Zen practitioner D. T. Suzuki, who was instrumental in explaining the “Zen mind” to Western readers in such books as The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind (1949) and Zen and Japanese Culture (1959). As a poet, Merton also found inspiration in the poets of those traditions, especially the Sufi poets of the Middle East.

Merton’s nearly lifelong appreciation for Asian philosophy and religion found its fullest expression in his writings in the 1960s. His essays on Zen were published in two collections, Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) and Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968). He also spent five years translating passages from the writings of the ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, published as The Way of Chuang Tzu in 1965, and in that same year his influential book Gandhi on Non-Violence was issued.

These books are essential in understanding Merton’s elation at the prospect of actually traveling to Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. His intense study of Buddhism and Sufism, not just in an academic way but as an adjunct and challenge to his own faith, had led to Thich Nhat Hanh’s earlier astonishment at Merton’s lack of Western dualism and to Sidi Abdeslam’s declaration that Merton had spiritually “arrived.” Even today, Merton is considered one of the three great explicators of Zen to the Western world, alongside philosopher Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki himself.

Although many inside the church, then as now, accused Merton of syncretism, of believing that all religions are essentially compatible, his thinking was far more complex and nuanced, and more than a dozen books have been written on the subject of Merton’s Eastern interests. While he readily acknowledged the differences between the world’s religious systems, he reserved his greatest fascination for their similarities, for how a mutual understanding among the different faiths might not only enrich those faiths but bring people together as well—an especially hopeful aspiration at the time of the Vietnam War. Merton wrote that all religions agree “that there is more to human life than just ‘getting somewhere,’ . . . that the highest ambition lies beyond ambition, in the renunciation of the ‘self,’ . . . that a certain ‘purification’ of the will and intelligence can open man’s spirit to a higher and more illuminated understanding of the meaning and purpose of life, or indeed of the very nature of Being itself.”28

And now, in the fall of 1968, Merton would have a chance to discuss these ideas with the adherents of those religions themselves.

•••

A rough itinerary was sketched out. He was to leave in September on what would become his most energizing and decisive spiritual journey. The trip was, in a sense, “Thomas Merton on tour,” the most extended series of speaking engagements he would ever have, and his many appearances at monasteries and conferences along the way helped finance parts of the trip.

The second week of September, he flew to New Mexico, where he visited the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, then being refurbished, and where he also spent time with artist Georgia O’Keefe. He then flew to Chicago, where he addressed a conference of Poor Clare sisters and celebrated Mass. The following week, he flew to Anchorage, Alaska, where he spoke at a conference at the Convent of the Sister Adorers of the Precious Blood in nearby Eagle River. From there he traveled to several other places in Alaska to meet bishops, sight-see, hike, and speak to various conferences and monastic gatherings, all the while toying with the idea of perhaps someday moving to a new hermitage in Alaska. The first week of October, he flew to California, where he returned to the Redwoods Monastery to conduct a three-day workshop and to meet with friends. At City Lights Bookstore he bought so many books that he had to pay extra baggage fees on his flights.

On October 15, his plane left San Francisco, and, after a stop in Honolulu, made its way to Japan. Merton then flew to Bangkok for two days, and then to Calcutta, India, where he experienced his first major bout of culture shock. The poverty and overcrowded conditions stunned him, and he found that despite being a monk with no possessions, he was still regarded as an affluent Westerner. He spoke at a four-day interfaith conference in South Calcutta, which proved to be an exhilarating experience; he was able to have extended discussions with delegates from many of the world’s major faiths.

In New Delhi a few days later, he was notified that his request for an audience with the fourteenth Dalai Lama (the tulku, or “custodian,” of Tibetan Buddhism) had been approved. Excitedly, Merton traveled to Dharamsala, spoke with Buddhist monks and spiritual leaders, and met with the Dalai Lama on November 4. The conversation was so stimulating that the Dalai Lama invited Merton to have two more audiences with him. They discussed monasticism, Marxism, contemplation, education, and the purpose of vows. When the two parted, they felt as if they were brothers, and two decades later, the Dalai Lama would write, “It was Merton who introduced me to the real meaning of the word ‘Christian.’”29

Merton then returned briefly to Calcutta before journeying to Darjeeling and several other cities. All along the way he celebrated Mass at various Catholic churches, spoke at conferences, and met with Buddhist Rinpoches, hermit monks, bishops and priests, and ordinary people. The next stop was a return to Bangkok, where he was scheduled to speak at an international conference of monastics, the event that had launched his journey to Asia in the first place.

Everything about this trip had been extraordinary, from Anchorage to Dharamsala, from Georgia O’Keefe to the Dalai Lama. On the day he left San Francisco two months earlier, he knew that this would be a time of self-discovery, the fulfillment of a dream. While over the Pacific on his flight to Asia, he had written, “I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body.”³⁰

•••

Sunday, December 8, 1968

He can’t help but be overwhelmed. Bangkok. The gaudy temples; the traffic noise; the markets with their brightly colored wares; the street vendors’ carts loaded with flowers and incense and steaming food; the sampans and long-tail boats on the Chao Phraya River; and, most of all, the people. Children everywhere, orange-robed Buddhist monks, the disabled and disfigured begging by the gates, streetwalkers, students handing out political tracts, women bargaining at the stalls, and old men in chairs, talking and watching. Some national celebration is underway. It’s hard to believe that Thailand isn’t more affected by the war—only Laos and Cambodia separate it from Vietnam. He’s closer now to the Demilitarized Zone than Louisville is to Minneapolis.

The sun slowly sets as he strolls northward from the Oriental Hotel to Chinatown, with its neon signs and food smells wafting from every doorway. Earlier today he met with a Dutch abbot and some of the conference delegates who, in a few hours, will drive him to the Red Cross Conference Center outside the city, where he will speak about Marxism and monasticism, a topic he’d discussed with the Dalai Lama. The Dutch delegation has a television crew in tow, convinced that a permanent record of the conference will be “good for the church.”31 A doubtful claim. Several weeks earlier he had promised Father Flavian that he would scrupulously avoid all publicity on this trip.

But he doesn’t have to worry about that until tomorrow. For now, he shuffles through the bustling streets, relishing it all: the fragrances, the colors, the confusion of tongues. He feels awake and alive, full of joy and light-years away from the tiny cabin in Kentucky. This is a far cry from Louisville or New York or London, but he senses a solidarity with these people just the same. He is home at last—at home in the world.