news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
The magazine Mutual Art presents an essay titled “An American Solitude: Short Stories by Edward Hopper.” Early 20th century American artist Hopper has been celebrated for insightful paintings portraying solitude in an urban sitting.
URL: https://www.mutualart.com/Article/An-American-Solitude–Short-Stories-by-E/81DAD09C6423E878
Audio segment dated 1961, from the BBC program “Voice of the People,” is titled “York’s Hermit on 30 Years of Solitude.” The BBC interviewer speaks (about 6 min.) with :
“Brother Walter Wilman, a religious recluse who has spent the past 30 years living in a tiny cell adjoined to the Church of All Saints in York.”
The “tiny cell” is what was historically called an “anchorhold.”
A summary article in History Today about historical hermits, with a refreshingly positive and “friendly” approach. Byline: “Medieval hermits were the agony aunts of their day.”
URL: https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/friendly-recluse
Stephen Batchelor — author of the classics Alone With Others and The Art of Solitude, plus his key book Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World — discusses his ideas about modern Buddhism with host Krista Tippett on an installmentment of the podcast On Being titled “Wonderous Doubt.”
Batchelor: “Many of my critics would be quite happy for me to stop calling myself a Buddhist. And even some of those who like my work feel that the Buddhism gets in the way. But I disagree profoundly with that. The rootedness in tradition is central to me; and I see Buddhist tradition — I suspect like other traditions, also — as not something which is static and fixed and somehow preserved in formaldehyde, but it is something that is alive.”
URL: https://onbeing.org/programs/stephen-batchelor-wondrous-doubt-mar2018/
The Sri Lankan Guardian offers a succinct essay about the British-born Harold Musson, who became the Sri Lankan Buddhist hermit Nanavira Thera and prolific writer on the intersection of Buddhism and modern existentialism. Was his life and death anomalous tragedy? “Nanavira likely saw the situation differently,” notes the author.
URL: https://slguardian.org/buddhism-nanavira-thera-the-hermit-of-bundala/
See also the Hermitary review of the book The Hermit of Bundala by Hiriko Nansuci.