Sangomusha - my first hermitage |
An
article in a recent newspaper reports that after an extensive survey of 841
scientific studies, a University of California professor has concluded that
solitude might be good for you: “single people tended to be happier in their
jobs, more likely to stay in touch with friends and family, more self-reliant
and less inclined to negativity.”
Well,
I could have told them all that about three decades ago, when I went on the
first of many ventures into temporary hermeticism in some or other tattered
cottage. So could a plethora of hermits,
recluses, wanderers, monks and mystics over the last couple of millennia. Not
that all such solitaries were entirely balanced, I suppose: living for years on
top of a stone pillar like Simon Stylites is seriously weird. But having been brought up in forested
mountains, an only child thrown largely on his own devices, I worked up skills
of self-sufficiency, of facing fears alone, and of joyous kinds of discovery
that don’t need to be shared with anyone for their power. A condition Socrates called autarkeia. (How distant that seems from the Age of the
Selfie, where the Selfie doesn’t actually exist until narcissistically revealed
to the world via Facebook or Instagram, so it’s really an Otherie.) It’s not that I don’t treasure conversation
and comradeship, I do; but I am still most profoundly content when I am alone,
a fact which bemuses and doubtless frustrates certain friends.
It’s
kind of warming to find solitaries down the ages – who are rarely entirely
solitary in practice – indirectly affirming my life-style. Solitude is not after all – as Anthony Storr also
argues in his psycho-analytic study, Solitude
(1988) – a pathology to be shunned, but
a “valuable resource”. At the same time,
Storr concludes, it’s not about achieving some perfect and lofty state of
enchantment: “If life is to continue, one cannot linger forever in a state of
oceanic tranquillity: ... the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of
the whole, take origin from the realisation that something is missing, from
awareness of incompletion”. Indeed, many
solitaires whose accounts I’ve read seem at once wisely in equilibrium and soulfully restless. Solitude is something of a paradox.
I’ve
recently been reading Peter France’s book Hermits
(1996), which devotes chapters to various sets of recluses and monkish types,
from the early Christian Desert Fathers to the poet Robert Lax on Patmos. I do like deserts and islands, but am ‘naturally’
drawn most strongly to forests, and so I find this thought, from the “small,
rather weak and very ugly” Russian monk Macarius, writing from the Siberian
forests around 1834, especially attractive:
Man finds peace of mind and benefit for
his soul in forests. We see that in
former times people used to withdraw into thick forests and there, away from
worldly vanity, through prayer and ascetic labour, sought salvation. Just one look at the evergreen conifers of
our homeland gladdens the eyes, portraying a symbol of our hope for eternal
life which people go to the deserts to seek ... The forests which surround our
monasteries should be preserved from destruction by all means in order to
prevent the word ‘wilderness’ from finally losing its meaning.
This
is echoed by the four-stage Hindu path.
The third stage is vanaprastha,
the forest ascetic: “When the householder sees wrinkles in his skin and grey in
his hair, and in the son of his son, let him retire to the forest.” The final stage, sannyasa, total renunciation, is that towards which a person
naturally matures. As the guru Sri
Ramakrishna put it: “The last part of Life’s path has to be walked in single
file.”
Peter
France includes a chapter on the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, easily my
favourite Christian writer. Like quite a
few of these alleged solitaries, Merton was a compulsive communicator and writer. And not only about the monk’s chosen life of
solitude and meditation. I return
frequently to his volume Conjectures of a
Guilty Bystander (1968), not because of its religious thought, but because
Merton was so in touch with the public world: he discusses the Vietnam War,
American racism, modern materialism and multiple other subjects with a
razor-sharp analytic mind. He says much
that we could all apply to our own situations even today. Another volume of his essays entitled On Peace (1962) should be required
reading for every power-inflated world leader, from Mugabe to Trump. In fact, in Conjectures, Merton writes only once about solitude: “Solitude is
to be preserved, not as a luxury, but as a necessity; not for ‘perfection’ so
much as for simple ‘survival’ in the life God has given you.” This is not so that you become insulated or
removed, but so that you are better placed to love those who most closely
depend on you, much as their demands might disturb your peace of mind: “Unlike
the great benevolent and public movements, full of noisy and shared concern, [this
basis for love] is not foggy, diffuse, devouring and absurd.”
I
first encountered Merton’s work in 1985 when I was cycling rather aimlessly
through New England, puffing across the bottom end of New Hampshire, when I
accidentally bumped into the outer fringes of Hurricane Gloria. I took shelter from the thrashing winds near
what turned out to be a monastery, known rather Pooh-ishly as Hundred Acres Monastery. Which it wasn’t really, or was no
longer. It had been a Trappist monastery
once, but only one of the original monks remained – the now elderly Father Paul
– surrounded by various waifs and strays, some religious, some not, some even
women. I asked Father Paul whether,
given this motley crew, whether he was still able to run the place on Biblical
principles, or what?
He
mulled gently on that for a while, then said: “I find the Bible very
puzzling. It’s very opaque to me.”
I
cheered inwardly: here was a man who been a monk for literally half a century,
who still found his faith’s founding text mysterious, who did not pretend to have
The Answers.
I
pressed, “But you must have some sort of rules to keep the place together, and
functioning. What rules for residents do
you have?”
He
thought about that for a while, too, then said: “Supper is at six. That’s all.”
And
so it was, as I discovered, living there for a few weeks while I earned some
badly needed funds working for a blasting company. Amongst the residents of Hundred Acres at the
time was one Wayne Teasdale – odd and gangly, very intense, hyper-intelligent,
vastly read and a prolific writer on mysticism; we spent hours walking the
roads through those wonderful autumnal New England woods talking of faiths and
mystics from Rumi to Meister Eckardt, from Bede Griffiths to Merton, most of
whom I had never heard of.
Wayne
Teasdale claimed to have had a vision of God – with the aid of a spot of LSD. There was another resident, Barry, as Christ-like
a being as I had ever imagined, compact and unthreatening in mind and body as a
block of basalt. He agreed Wayne had had
a profound vision, but not as deep as his own experience of the ‘Godhead’, or
the ‘One Principle’, or the ‘Ground of Being’ – I was impressed that he didn’t
want to affix a name to ‘it’. Barry was
building himself a real hermitage back in the woods. Vision or not, he was
taking no chances: as an engineer he was building it like a land-based survival
raft that would safely ride out the upheavals of any miscreant earthquake.
More
lyrical, meandering and personalised than Peter France’s survey is Isabel Colegate’s
account of hermits and solitaries, A
Pelican in the Wilderness (2002).
The title comes from my favourite Renaissance poet, Thomas Traherne: “A
man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow upon the Hous top, and
like a Pelican in the Wilderness”. Ironically,
she notes, few hermits were ever truly solitary; they were often quite social,
living in coenobitic communities, or awkwardly being pursued by a public hungry
for wisdoms. Colegate ranges widely,
from Syria to the Skelligs, from Krishnamurti to Charles de Foucauld in the
Sahara. But that’s as far south as she
or Peter France go.
Really,
have there been no sub-Saharan African hermits?
The search is on...
*****
A lovely meditation on meditation, Dan! I wonder, though, if one were to live as a hermit in a true wilderness, wouldn't the chances of survival be low? Wouldn't finding sustenance and avoiding beasts of prey be a constant challenge and distraction?
ReplyDeleteSo interesting, Dan. I liked the quote from the Russian monk especially.
ReplyDelete