Just trying to mimic baroque practices
One of them, stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature and not like a stray dog. St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park, in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don't recall what kind of city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades. That is Thomas Merton writing in his early autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain . He was born in the Catalonian town of Prades a short distance from the Abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa , which is seen in my accompanying photos. During the French Revolution much of the Romanesque abbey, including the