Merton abandoned his own spiritual rejection of the world.
Evidence
But only three years after its publication, Merton wrote to Rice, disowning the book: “I have become very different from what I used to be…The Steven Storey Mountain is the work of a man I never even heard of.” It had to do, he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville: 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 these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 221
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims