"Merton's enthusiasm for a new book, a just discovered author, a fascinating idea, would jostle with cynical asides and sardonic humour on the same page. His diary entries were a means of self-exploration, a mode of earnest dialogue with the anonymous reader and with himself. Some entries are nature cameos, some are compilations of things done or books to be read, some are introspective exercises, some mature meditations, and some are simply vehicles of frustration and anger. There are diary entries that serve as short essays, like the piece on Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt's notion of the 'banality of evil,' and there are diary entries that function as short mystical expositions, like the piece on the point vierge, or virgin point.

"Merton's diaries reveal the person. They are direct, sometimes intimate, and always honest, even if polished and fine-tuned for reader consumption. In this regard, the published journals — that is, those published during his lifetime and over which he had editorial control — are different from the often more lengthy, seldom discreet, often raw data that define the unpolished restricted journals. It is important that the reader keep in mind that the poet of Gethsemani was engaged in the endless task of making and remaking himself, and to that end, his published journals or diaries were subject to careful editing and rewriting. In short, the fresh voice of the diarist is a fine example of disciplined spontaneity. Merton wrote to be published.

The masks of the Gethsemani diarist are many: the monk as rebel, the monk as visionary, the monk as artist, the monk as religious thinker and public intellectual, the monk as the divided self, the monk as conscience of the nation, the monk as troublesome charge, the monk as renegade, the monk as obedient son, and the monk as guru. As an assemblage of masks, of personae, they tell us something about the essential Merton. They tell us what he would have us know during his lifetime; following his death, the publication of his restricted journals would tell us the rest.

"Although all autobiography is a form of exhibitionism, it is controlled exhibitionism. Merton's diaries are not passive things: he thinks, wills and feels in his journals. They are fragments of an ongoing conversation, a vital dialogue between diarist and reader, a kind or type of spiritual direction. Their immense popularity is in part attributable to the fact that, in spite of his extraordinary gifts, he is portrayed as a common wayfarer, and his search for the true self, 'to be alone with the Alone,' is a search available to everyone.

"Accessible to the many rather than the elite, more inclined on occasion to use slang rather than the affected discourse of the intellectual dilettante or the rarefied prose of the academic, Merton could commune with the erudite one moment and ask some visitors to bring a six-pack of Budweiser the next. Readers like the Merton of the diaries because he is without cant, exalted self-regard or magisterial pretensions."