Alone, alone, all, all alone (well, nearly)
Alan Wall HERMITS: THE INSIGHTS OF SOLITUDE by Peter France Chatto, f16.99, pp. 240 Five centuries back, one would have been more than likely on any lengthy jour- ney to reach a bridge which had a hermit living there in his hermitage-chapel. A donation (not large) would have been solicited, and most likely given. It would have gone towards the maintenance of the bridge, and some prayers for the soul of the traveller, in anticipation of his forth- coming trials of judgment and purgation. There was a vibrant mediaeval symbolism in this. Every pope and every bishop was designated pontifex, bridge-builder, and each primitive arc across a stream was emblematic of the two lives of the Chris- tian, the one embraced and the one renounced.
What the Christian was biblically enjoined to renounce was 'the world', the theology of which was enunciated in the gospel and letters of Saint John, and the cathedratic epistles of Saint Paul. The world that in John's formulation `passeth away' along with the lusts thereof is not a geographic location, but a spiritual one. It is the locus of impermanence and transito-
ry passion, the glittering circus of baubles and gewgaws, the spent seed of fleshly incontinence. This world may have its brightest lights in big pagan cities, but its fearful reality is inscribed forever upon the small cell of the human heart. This is Canaan and Baal beckoning, the faces of their ritual prostitutes gleaming back from the golden walls of Jerusalem.
What is a hermit? In the very first definition in the OED, it is 'one who from religious motives has retired into solitary life; esp. one of the early Christian reclus- es.' That has broadened out, of course, not always helpfully, to include anything or anyone which, like the hermit crab, prefers to keep itself to itself, even subaqueously.
Peter France has not really set out to clarify these definitions. The blurb tells us of the hermits he discusses that 'these men and women still have something vitally important to say to a society that fears soli- tude'. This is misleading, firstly because his book is in fact all about men, and secondly because 'solitude', in the sense most of us have of being alone, is the last thing the average hermit can expect. After reading this book, one is made even more aware that a prime requirement for being a her- mit is the ability to deal with vastly larger numbers of devotees, correspondents, visi- tors and straightforward tourists than the standard 20th-century rock-star could con- ceivably cope with, even with the assistance of hard drugs, a low IQ and a modest army of PR agents. No, if it's solitude you're after, a successful career in a marketing company in London and a second home in Dorset is a vastly better bet. Apart from anything else, no one on earth is likely to think you're much worth stalking and talk- ing to — and, to be fair, that particular mythic no one is most likely to be right.
The pattern appears to be set in stone: the pilgrim feels the need to flee the conta- gions of razzmatazz and chirrupy civility, and consequently clears off far enough into
'1 could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine . . . and you want to hear Thomas the Tank Engine.' whatever 'desert' is afforded, to escape humanity. Humanity immediately follows, in ever greater droves, in pursuit of whatever hidden wisdom is denied it. If the would-be eremite (a word that in its Greek form has the desert buried sandily inside it) should seek such forms of silence and serenity as are indicated by the name Trap- pist, then the said seeker will soon be rewarded, as that most famous of modern Trappist monks, Thomas Merton, put it, thus: `. . two hundred and seventy lovers of solitude are packed into a building that was meant for seventy'. Communal dormi- tories, communal liturgies (starting at 2 a.m.), communal meals . . . where's soli- tude in this? Merton found his cell finally, but it was a cell which was not outside humanity and society, but within it, as it was always intended to be.
One of the many insights of Peter Brown's remarkable and learned book, The Body and Society, was how structured and social a place the desert of the Desert Fathers was. It was an icon, set in opposi- tion to the different icon of the city, but it was by no means uninhabited. Peter France has picked on a number of figures who might be described as hermits, though what Socrates is doing in the preamble here is anyone's guess: to form a principled opposition to society from within is hardly the same as seeking to leave the noise of society's chatter (even its philosophic chatter) entirely behind. A more genuine philosopher-hermit, tortured between the claims of communication and those of mys- tic self-communion, would surely have been Wittgenstein, during his sojourns in Norway and Ireland. He, however, does not get a mention. One wonders, too, if Thore- au can really be usefully described as a her- mit. A solitary, certainly, one who found humanity frequently tiresome, but this was far from being a good sign, for there was a lack of humility in the sage of Walden which distinguishes him radically from Charles de Foucauld or Thomas Merton, and that crucial distinction is not made clear in this book.
The chapters on de Foucauld and Merton in themselves are excellent and are, one suspects, where this study began. For the true hermitage of the soul, though, one might sometimes have to look in the least advertised spaces. Emily Dickinson seems to fit the bill, retired there in Amherst, largely incomprehensible to her fellow-beings, regarding with humorous disdain the neighbours who arose every morning to address an eclipse they called Father. How, she wondered, did they have the strength to tie their shoelaces in the morning? And her scepticism regarding any swarming urban witness versus the tra- ditions of the deracinated spirit remains surely pertinent today: No Crowd that has occurred Exhibit — I suppose
That General Attendance That Resurrection — does.
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