Inspirational Quote§

by Russell Dyer

published: dec 10, 2015; revised: dec 10, 2015; readers in past month: 308

In Search of Kafka

In Search of Kafka

  • author: Russell J.T. Dyer

  • published: 2018

  • publisher: A Silent Killdeer

  • isbn: 978-0578041063

  • pages: 217

In the front of my new novel, this novel, I put the following quote from Thomas Merton’s book, Seven Storey Mountain:

And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. Perhaps the inner motive is that the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives.

If I were to say this in a simpler way, I would say that there is no greater sin than to show disinterest for another person’s love for us. Merton is also saying that we’re strangely more interested in loving someone, than being loved by someone. Said from the other person’s perspective, it hurts when someone rejects our love for them — therein lies the sin, the emotional and spiritual offense.

I believe that this phenomenon of being disinterested in love from others is the cause of many people not having friends: either we reject offers of friendship from others, which leads to us having few or no true friends; or others reject our offers of friendship, leaving us alone and without friends. There is no reason that a person should have no friends. And yet many people do not have any true friends.

This human experience of rejecting the love of others, rejecting offers of friendship, is the basis for my novel. It’s an illustration of how life can be for such a person. But it’s also a fiction of how life and love can shake the stubbornness out of us, to wake us to the fact that we are not alone and we need and want friends.