Various writers have noted the irony of his life's tragic conclusion, given that "The Seven Storey Mountain" closes by admonishing the reader to "learn to know the Christ of the burnt men" (see, e.g., "The Man in the Sycamore Tree", 1979). "The Seven Storey Mountain" propelled Merton into a life of paradoxes: a man who left an urban intellectual career for a labor-oriented rural existence, only to be led back into the realm of international opinion and debate; a man who spurned the literary world for the anonymity of cenobitic life in a Trappist monastery, only to become a world-famous author; and a man who professed his devotion to remain fixed in the confines of a monastic cell, only to fulfill an urge to travel throughout Asia.