Sunday, October 31, 2010

Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the World Created by “Mad Men”)


“Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.”—Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

It’s difficult to imagine Thomas Merton (1915-1968) occupying the same world as Don Draper, but one of the last books of the cloistered monk appeared in the same tumultuous decade in which the protagonist of the Emmy-winning series Mad Men labored.

Among Merton’s many books was The New Man, and oddly enough he and Draper shared something in common: the need to shed an old persona that caused them acute shame. Yet there the resemblance ends.

While Draper and his co-workers at the Sterling Cooper ad agency strive at all hazards in a profession aimed at encouraging and even exalting desires, Merton worked even harder to sublimate his, in an all-consuming quest to experience the goodness of the Almighty.

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