Finished the last of Thomas Merton's Journals. Have very mixed emotions about Merton's life after reading all seven volumes, they do not paint Merton is the best of lights, and in fact, showed Merton's failure as a religious. It is very obvious by the journals that Merton was a conflicted person; striving to find God, live as a hermit, but his emotional make-up did not allow him to do that. One of the tragedies of the whole thing is Merton's inability to pull his life together, in fact, in volume five you witness his disintegration over his falling in love with a student nurse -- he was in very bad shape during that time. By the time he gets to his trip to the Far East, even he knows that his time is up at the monastery in Kentucky, and he will wind up somewhere else. Even so, he dies on that trip, and the casket is flown to his monastery, where he is buried. A very difficult life to understand, where he kept on proclaiming how he wanted to be left alone, and yet, he was unable to accomplish what he wanted his life to be. Truthfully, his last couple of years were a mess. Closed the last journal with a tremendous sense of sadness...