The real trouble with “the world,” in the bad sense which the Gospel condemns, is that it is a complete and systematic sham, and he who follows it ends not by living but by pretending he is alive, and justifying his pretense by an appeal to the general conspiracy of all the others to do the same. It is this pretense that must be vomited out in the desert. But when the monastery is only a way station to the desert, when it remains permanently that and nothing else, then one is neither in the world nor out of it. One lives marginally, with one foot in the general sham.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 310
