Fourth and Walnut

Thomas Merton Square

I had only 15 minutes on the parking meter at Fourth Street in downtown Louisville, KY, just enough time to hastily walk up to Thomas Merton Square at the infamous corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets (now called Muhammad Ali Boulevard, however) where I could possibly bask in the energy that might still be present there –

This is the place where Trappist monk Thomas Merton – author, poet, contemplative, and spokesman for interfaith relations in the 1950s and 60s – experienced his sudden epiphany (or satori or mystical revelation) which he describes in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

This is where it happened . . .

It occurs to me that this may be the only historical marker in America that is meant to herald something so intangible and un-provable as inner revelation. Most markers commemorate a Civil War battle or a political figure or the birthplace of someone famous. This commemorates the inner awakening of a sequestered monk on a street corner in 1958, one that would launch the remaining decade of his life in which he would travel the world and write primarily about social justice and the commonality of all faiths. We are all one, he said over and over until his tragic death in Thailand in 1968.

I expected much from the experience, and as it turns out I had just enough time to run up to the corner, hastily cross the street, snap a few pictures, then re-hastily cross the street from whence I came and return to the relative quiet of my car. The corner was so noisy, so full of the confusion of cars and people and street musicians and construction – or destruction – I don’t know which – for there was a lopped off cement head the size of a small boulder propped on the sidewalk where Merton must have stood and discovered oneness and love for all humanity. The head may have belonged to a gargoyle and may have fallen from the building above, who knows – for there was no body to claim it. I had to step over and around the thing to get my picture of the bronze sign clarifying the reason for naming this corner after the Trappist monk who wrote so many of the books I read in my youth and which had influenced me in so many untraceable, intangible ways . . . who knows . . . but perhaps I should have snapped a picture of the lopped off head staring up at me, for that was more reflective of my own state of mind at this time and place where I had hoped to bask in the revelatory moment of another man’s destiny.

A sample of Merton's few belongings

Only a mile or two from Thomas Merton Square is Bellarmine University where Merton’s few worldly belongings are collected – and I had only an hour there because the visitor parking space near the library warned me I could take no more. Once inside, my mood was quieted as the friendly, calm curator explained that since Merton had no family and had taken a vow of poverty at the monastery, his personal belongings were minimal – but what he did have was there in the library, all of it – his books, original manuscripts, letters and journals; his blue chambray work shirt and white cowl and farm boots and eyeglasses, that sort of thing; and the object that spoke loudest to me: his old Royal typewriter. I approached it with respect and awe – Thomas Merton’s typewriter, in plain view, not encased, and not off limits.

My pilgrimage was made worthwhile

I placed my own fingertips on the keys of Thomas Merton’s typewriter just in the places where he had done so and had thus composed the many books that meant so much to me as a teenager in the 1970s when I was stubbornly learning to bake bread and write and hone some kind of world view.  I used to save my babysitting money to send off by mail order for each book, one at a time as I could afford them, I told the curator. On the hood of the typewriter was taped a handwritten “guide” to what the number and symbol keys really meant – for apparently those keys were mixed up and didn’t correspond to what they said they were, the curator explained. “Rub your hand over it,” he implored me – “That is what Merton did when he placed it there,” and he made a sweeping motion across the typewriter with his own hand to demonstrate what he meant.  Some spirit rushed through me in that second when I did so – and then it was gone – but revelatory, satori-like, in my own private kind of way.