Writing for Clarity, but Not Total Clarity
Thomas Merton:
“I am still trying to find out: and that is why I write.”
“How will you find out by writing?”
“I will keep putting things down until they become clear.”
“And if they do not become clear?”
“I will have a hundred books, full of symbols, full of everything I ever knew or ever saw or ever thought.”
“If it never becomes clear, perhaps you will have more books than if it were clear all at once.”
“No doubt. But I say if it were all clear at once, I would not really understand it, either. Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing. This is not understanding; it is something you remember.”
My Argument with the Gestapo (Quoted in Mary Gordon’s On Thomas Merton, pp. 82f). Merton wrote this novel in 1941, but it wasn’t published until 1969, a year after his death. The person speaking in the first person here is the protagonist in Merton’s novel; Gordon suggests his voice is Merton’s.)
See Anita Lewis for a “clear as mud” take on this.