Dr. Paul Pearson examines Merton’s changing relationship to the world as he moved from the world denying monk of the forties and early fifties to the world embracing monk of the final decade of his life. Merton found that the "night spirit and the dawn air," central to his monastic calling, were his way of "redeeming the rhinoceros", a sign of modern humanity caught in a technological stampede to nowhere, and symbolized for Merton by the sound of the guns from nearby Fort Knox.