An essay published in an anthology edited by Kurt Caswell and published by Texas Tech University Press: “The heat pulls us into ourselves and conversation dies away. We measure words out as if each one were made of ice water. There is ample time to read, but in the desert I cannot read lengthy books. This is not a country of long tea times and Russian novels. This is the land of the epigram. And so every afternoon I pick up a slim volume on the early Christian desert fathers who in the fourth and fifth centuries AD went out into the deserts of the Negev and the Sinai and spent their lives there. The book is by Thomas Merton, who throughout his career had so extraordinarily much to say about brevity, about silence . . . “
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