Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Merton

October is the month that makes ambition feel inevitable, and Merton knows it’s a trap as much as a thrill. Calling it “fine and dangerous” catches the particular American spell of early fall: crisp air, sharpened light, the sense that you can start over because the calendar says so. “Dangerous” isn’t melodrama; it’s a warning about the seduction of possibility itself. In October, desire becomes organized: syllabi appear, catalogs swell with promise, and the self starts drafting its next version.

The line about college does sly cultural work. The course catalogue is consumer culture in scholarly clothing, a menu of selves you can purchase with tuition and time. Everything “looks wonderful” because you haven’t yet paid the real cost: the limits, the boredom, the grind, the way choosing one thing means abandoning a hundred others. Merton’s understatement lands because it describes the exact moment before disillusionment, when optimism hasn’t been tested by endurance.

Context matters here. Merton, who moved from worldly striving toward monastic discipline, writes like someone who’s watched the mind chase novelty and call it freedom. The sentence isn’t anti-education; it’s anti-enchantment. October becomes a metaphor for America’s favorite mood: perpetual beginning, a faith that the next commitment will finally deliver coherence. His subtext is that beginnings are easy to romanticize precisely because they’re unproven. The danger is not failure, but dispersion: a life spent enrolling, forever, in the idea of a life.