Overview

"Hermits have thrived in every major historical era, geography, culture, and society - from antiquity to the present, East and West, in deserts, forests, and mountains, depicted in art, literature, and lore. What are their motives? Religious, spiritual, philosophical? Ethical, aesthetic, psychological? From a love of wilderness to a desire for the anonymity of life as a ""hermit in the city."" From an inkling about the universe to a desire for radical simplicity. The historical hermits have reflected all of these. As Kahlil Gibran put it, ""A hermit renounces the world of fragments to enjoy the world wholly, without interruption."" Hermits want, as Thoreau proposed of himself, to ""live deliberately."" Within these pages, all these motives are explored, all the hermits considered: poets, sages, teachers, philosophers, the eccentric, pious, irreverent, sociable, reclusive, and wise - men and women. Hermits from India, China, Japan, and South Asia, huts, cells, and cabins, from the Middle East to Europe to the United States. The waning of hermits shifted the modern Western world to solitude. But the persistence of hermits, even today, is universal."

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9781736866504

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Aristotle and John Donne were wrong. Some of us might be social animals, but there have always been those of us who are islands. A richer or more complete account would be hard to imagine. Everything but the floor plans. -- Bill Porter, author, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits and Finding Them Gone: Visiting China's Poets of the Past. ... a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the hermit tradition from the ancient Greeks to contemporary exemplars of social withdrawal... -- David Vincent (emeritus professor of social history, The Open University), author, The Book of Solitude and Privacy: A Short History. ... a wonderful, sympathetic and informative book from a lifelong researcher of hermit life and lore. I loved reading it, and I cannot recommend it more. -- Andreas Matthias (professor of philosophy, Lingnan University, Hong Kong), author, Neural Networks Without the Math; editor, Daily Philosophy online magazine.

Author Information

Robert Rodriguez spent forty years as a librarian in university, college and public libraries. He is the founder of the Hermitary website (hermitary.com) and editor since its 2002 inception.

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