blind alleys

 

Handwritten notes and poems by Robert Lax, courtesy of the Lax archives at St. Bonaventure University

 

"Bob Lax was a potential prophet, but without rage. A king, but a Jew too. A mind full of tremendous and subtle intuitions, and every day he found less and less to say about them, and resigned himself to being inarticulate. In his hesitations, though without embarrassment or nervousness at all, he would often curl his long legs all around a chair in seven different ways, while he was trying to find a word with which to begin. ... Lax has always been afraid he was in a blind alley, and half aware that, after all, it might not be a blind alley, but God, infinity."

- Thomas Merton (Seven Story Mountain)