Thomas Merton wrote The Silent Life a decade after he retreated to the discipline of Trappist monasticism. In his prologue to The Silent Life, Merton describes the book as 'a meditation on the monastic life by one who, without any merit of his own, is privileged to know that life from the inside ... who seeks only to speak as the mouthpiece of a tradition centuries old.' It is a work that combines a lucid and informative de scription of the nature and forms of monasticism, communal and solitary, with a passionate defense of the con templative's quest for God. The intense beauty of Merton's meditation, radiating from beneath its surface calm, makes The Silent Life a classic of its kind.
