Thoughts in Solitude is a book of meditations. It is more closely related to Seeds of Contemplation and No Man Is an Island than to any other work of the author. In thoughtful and eloquent prose, Father Merton speaks on behalf of man's inalienable right to solitude and interior freedom. Society, he tells us, depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. It is made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one's own reality and of one's ability to give himself to society.