Thomas Merton, Music Critic?

So I'm reading The Seven Storey Mountain finally, for the first time. Yeah, I know how can you call yourself a reader and let that one get by..there's lots of those, sadly. Or maybe that's a hopeful thing. Anyway, I like it not the least of which because it seems like old Tom might have been more than a wee bit of an asshole, which, in a famous religious person, is something I can appreciate. Forget feet, an entire body of clay is the kind I seek for a role model.

Merton is forthright and not afraid to own up to his sins (and I haven't even gotten to the illigitimate kid bit) but what I like best are some of the dead on observations that seemingly come from nowhere. Like:

"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell."

Is that a blues song waiting to happen or what? Or this:

"I used to go to Levy's, on the top floor of one of those big buildings in the crescent of Regent Street, because they imported all the latest Victors and Brunswicks and Okehs from America, and I would lock myself up in one of those little glass-doored booths, and play all the Duke Ellingtons and Louis Armstrongs and the old King Olivers and all the other things I have forgotten. Basin Street Blues, Beale Street Blues, Saint James Infirmary, and all the other places that had blues written about them: all these I suddenly began to know much of by indirection and woeful hearsay, and I guess I lived vicariously in all the slums in all the cities of the South: Memphis and New Orleans and Birmingham, places which I have never yet seen. I don't know where those streets were, but I certainly knew something true about them, which I found out on that top floor on Regent Street."

I don't think any music critic could have said it any better.