"The only real city in America"

Reading Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. It's an exploration of the lives and work of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor. It's been on my shelf for far too long, and I'm thankful I finally decided to crack it open. Here, Elie describes Merton's first visit to Gethsemani, for a Holy Week retreat in 1941:
     "He had arrived at two a.m., gone to sleep, and risen at four to find the monks already down in the church praying the Divine Office. As a layperson, he was restricted to the visitors' gallery in the rear of the church, and from there he watched the long, slow ritual of monastic worship--the sea of white woolen cowls, the chant seeming to rise toward the stained glass.
     'This is the only real city in America--in a desert. It is the axle around which the whole country   blindly turns...'
     The monks had scattered to the separate aspects of the monastic day: private prayer, study in theology, work in the barns and fields surrounding the monastery, a meal of bread and cheese taken in silence at long tables, and at last the night office, followed by lights out.
     Now, with the monks asleep, Merton sat awake, writing.
     'What right do I have to be here?'"