Currently Reading The Seven Storey Mountain By Thomas Merton see related

As I was reading Thomas Merton's autobiography I found myself wishing he had waited a little longer to write it.  He  began writing it in his late 20's, shortly after entering a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.  It seems way too young to be writing the story of your life, and I was more particularly interested in his life and reflections while in the monastery.  I suppose I can get a lot of that from his other books; so far I've only read The New Man. 

Regarding the logic of worldly success, Merton writes:  "A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!"  Indeed, the real me is not the image someone else has of me, or even the image I have of myself.  The real me is the one that exists in God's imagination.  That's what I want to become.

There is a related point in the epilogue, where Merton takes up the question of what is the fruit of the contemplative life.  He stresses that it's not merely personal, and the sharing of it is not limited to writing books or giving seminars.  It doesn't even require direct contact in all cases.  He says "Prayer can do the work wonderfully well, and indeed the fire of contemplation has a tendency to spread of itself throughout the Church and vivify all the members of Christ in secret without any conscious act on the part of the contemplative."

He says that regardless of who you are, "you are all called to a deep interior life perhaps even to mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others."  If not by word, then by example.  The effect of having this "sublime fire of infused love" burning in your soul is viral.  The radius of those touched by your word or example is always larger than we imagine, and probably includes souls yet unborn.  Thomas Merton's contemplative life is a first rate example of that fact.