Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior word must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else’s sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.
It may seem that a child begins by answering his parents. This is not true. What is important in the child is his primal utterance, his response to being, his own free cries and signs, his admiration. It is true that he has to learn language. Unfortunately in learning to speak, he also learns to answer as expected. Thus he learns more than language: he acquires, with words themselves, a kind of servitude. He gives out the words that are asked of him, that evoke a pleasant or approving response. He … engineers consent. He does not merely answer: he conforms, or he resists. He is already involved in public relations.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 85
