It was the fall of 1936, just at the beginning of the new school year. . . . My veins were still bursting with the materialistic and political enthusiasms with which I had first come to Columbia and, indeed, in line with their general direction, I had signed up for courses that were more or less sociological and economic and historical. In the obscurity of the strange, half-conscious semi-conversion that had attended my retreat from Cambridge, I had tended to be suspicious of literature, poetry . . . on the grounds that they might lead to a sort of futile estheticism, a philosophy of "escape." ... 

So now I was climbing one of the crowded stairways in Hamilton Hall to the room where I thought this history course was to be given. I looked in to the room. The second row was filled with the unbrushed heads of those who every day at noon sat in the Jester editorial offices and threw paper airplanes around the room or drew pictures on the walls. ... 

It was when I had taken off my coat and put down my load of books that I found out that this was not the class I was supposed to be taking, but Van Doren's course on Shakespeare.

So I got up to go out. But when I got to the door I turned around again and went back and sat down where I had been, and stayed there. Later I went and changed everything with the registrar, so I remained in that class for the rest of the year.

It was the best course I ever had at college. And it did me the most good, in many different ways. It was the only place where I ever heard anything really sensible said about any of the things that were really fundamental--life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity. ... The material of literature and especially drama is chiefly human acts--that is, free acts, moral acts, And, as a matter of fact, literature, drama, poetry, make certain statements bout these acts that can be made in no other way. That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order. . . . 

All that year we were, in fact, talking about the deepest springs of human desire and hope and fear; we were considering all the most important realities. . . . [Van Doren's] balanced and sensitive and clear way of seeing things, at once simlpe and yet capable of subtlety, being fundamentally scholastic, though not necessarily and explicitly Christian, presented these things in ways that made them live within us, and with a life that was healthy and permanent and productive. This class was one of the few things that could persuade me to get on the train and go to Columbia at all. It was, that year, my only health ...

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, 179-80