Before the secret is exposed, the world is not even aware of its absence. We live in ignorance. The bearer of the secret seems like an ordinary person to us, with ordinary, inconsequential preoccupations. With the articulation of the secret, he suddenly stands out in his landscape, strange and separate, like the stone monument that the people of Hailibu’s village are said to have carved in honor of him when they returned home after surviving the cataclysm. Gods create the world with words and breath that they unleash in their yearning for company in the void. The secret, once it has been spoken, unleashes another kind of world: it illuminates what was once in shadow and forces those of us who hear it out of our previous ignorance. It gives us information about the beginning of the world or the end of it, about the vulnerability of a king or a village chief, or even about the obsessive desires of a goddess. With such knowledge in our consciousness, we must grow up a little bit more. We must acknowledge that the mighty ones are more like us than we thought, or we are more like them. In so doing, we become more fully human.

@ Parabola (via Hermitary)

The odd invoice arrived, followed by their reminders, and then not even them.
Direct debit arrangements handled most of the bills, including the maintenance charge on the apartment.
The guy who comes to read the electricity meter didn’t ring the doorbell, because he didn’t need to: the meter is in the basement.
The man lay in the bathroom doorway.
At some point the bathroom lamp gave up the ghost, as they do, and he was left in the dark.

Autumn came. Free newspapers and junk-mail continued to be forced bodily through the slit in the door.
One quiet day the weight of the collected mail and newspapers pushed open the inner door and the papers slithered down and spread out across the hall floor.
There was now space for more.
And then the silence continued.

@ Helsingen Sanomat

This timelapse account of the death of an urban hermit in Helsinki reminds me of Jim Crace’s novel Being Dead.

If I’d only stuck with it, I might have had a successful career as a beachcomber by now.

Which is appealing because, you know, the bar for success as a beachcomber seems fairly low.

Or maybe not:

Not that it is good or becoming that many should attempt the part of the Beachcomber. All cannot play it who would. Few can be indifferent to that which men commonly prize. All are not free to test touchy problems with the acid of experience. Besides, there are not enough thoughtful islands to go round. Only for the few are there ideal or even convenient scenes for those who, while perceiving some of the charms of solitude, are at the same time compelled by circumstances ever and anon to administer to their favourite theories resounding smacks, making them jump to the practical necessities of the case.

~ EJ Banfield, The Confessions of a Beachcomber (1906)

Also, the 1909 New York Times page (PDF) including a review of Banfield’s book is a fascinating time capsule of racial representations.

“There are an awful lot of people creating their own meditation spaces” in Second Life, said Hoch, sensing a patient need. “We will make some adaptations, but we also want to take advantage of the multi-use strengths of Second Life.”

Studies such as Hoch’s could draw doctors, patients, and money to Second Life, if they prove that therapies offered “in-world,” as Second Lifers refer to their realm, can be effective in the real world.

@ Boston Globe

A vocational aspect of eremitism does not preclude eccentricity bordering on what others would consider irrational. Elements of austerity, asceticism, aesthetics, and personality strongly influence average people judging others. Such values are so anti-modern that people cannot but dismiss those who hold them as eccentric or worse.

Add physical reclusion to this mix and most people will conflate the hermit and the recluse. All of these traits are alien to the goings-on of the world, where power, beauty, cleverness, and social pleasures are the chief virtues.

@ Hermit’s thatch

Famous Hermits in Canadian History provides informative profiles of notable hermits and recluses in Canadian history.

(via Hermitary)

More fundamentally, New Monastics consider themselves “monks in the world.” They are not interested in extreme isolation or asceticism (though there are stories about the occasional Protestant “hermit” living in the Mountain West). Nearly all have regular jobs and social lives. From the traditionalist perspective, many break the most essential monastic rule: they are married. Most groups support those who choose a celibate lifestyle, and a few have a member or two who do so, but it happens rarely.

[…] American culture has never placed a high priority on solitude, and historically, self-denial has gone hand in hand with bustling capitalist productivity, not contemplation (though the Puritans did balance their active lives with a heavy dose of journaling and soul-searching). America has produced a few geniuses of contemplative life – Henry Thoreau and Emily Dickinson come to mind – but we have no indigenous contemplative tradition comparable to that of Catholic Europe or Buddhist Japan. Yet contemplation is the heart of what it means to be a monk: the root of the word, monos, means “alone” in Greek.

~ Boston Globe

I have no clear idea of how long I have been here. I should have kept track. Don’t all trapped island men keep a calendar? Didn’t Crusoe? Did Prospero? But why should I? Wouldn’t it be better if I could forget time? Wouldn’t that be the great benefit of it all?

“Isn’t that what I keep hoping for?” I said to Benedictus.

And he said to me, “This is paradise but that the past and the future continue to frame your thinking.” And so where would a calendar fit in?

“You don’t need language any more than time,” he told me but by then we were taking off our clothes and walking into the cove. The water wasn’t muddy as it is now, it was clear and warm, without the layer of cold so it must have been summer.

[…]

You need to blow out to breath in, so you start to blow on the way up so when you get to the surface you’re ready for a deep breath and you trick the voice in your throat who thinks that you’ve already started to breath and he leaves you alone in a plume of bubbles the current carries barely off to the side.

When I’m just a head floating on the water above the reef I call Parrot Fish Reef I look at the island and think my hell could be paradise. If I could just be here and nowhere else.

~ Dennis Phillips, from Hope

Quite quickly I lost the habit of having regular hours of sleep; I slept for periods of one or two hours, during the day as well as the night, but, without knowing why, I felt each time the need to huddle in one of the crevices. There was no trace of animal or vegetable life. Any kind of landmark in general in the landscape was rare: sandbanks, ponds, and lakes of variable size stretched out as far as I could see. The layer of cloud, which was very dense, most of the time prevented me from making out the sky; it was not, however, completely immobile, but its movements were extremely slow. Occasionally, a small space opened between two cloud masses, through which I caught sight of the sun, or the constellations; it was the only event, the only modification in the passing of the days, the universe was enclosed in a sort of cocoon or stasis, fairly close to the archetypal image of eternity. I was, like all neohumans, immune to boredom; some limited memories, some pointless daydreams occupied my detached, floating consciousness. I was, however, a long way away from joy, and even from real peace; the sole fact of existing is already a misfortune. Departing from, at my own free will, the cycle of rebirths and deaths, I was making my way toward a simple nothingness, a pure absence of content. Only the Future Ones would perhaps succeed in joining the realm of countless potentialities.

~ Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

It’s no picnic being a modern-day hermit. Beyond the loneliness and poverty common to the eremitic life in any era, the contemporary hermit struggles with an issue less vexing to hermits of old: finding a way to withdraw while earning enough to pay the rent.

@ New York Times