Hermits around the web – Hermitary
news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
Boing Boing, eclectic website, offers this note: “A teen Michelangelo’s demon painting finally identified.” The painting titled The Torment of Saint Anthony was only discovered in 2008!
URL: https://boingboing.net/2026/01/16/a-teen-michelangelos-demon-painting-finally-identified.html
The CinemaGuild presents a 103 min. film titled “Geographies of Solitude.” From the Guild: An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic, ‘Geographies of Solitude’ follows Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived there for over 40 years collecting, cleaning and documenting marine litter that persistently washes up on the island’s shores. Shot on 16mm and created using eco-friendly filmmaking techniques, Jacquelyn Mills’ award-winning film is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world filled with arresting images and made with an activist spirit.”
URLs (film trailer)Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elPD39kyF6c; Vimeo: https://store.cinemaguild.com/nontheatrical/product/2660.html
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Research Gate offers a free open access acholarly article titled “Loneliness and solitude in gifted writers: the legacies of childhood” published in Journal of Psychosocial Studies. The article is also available as a PDF download. Abstract:
“In this study, we attempt to provide insight into the complex interplay between loneliness/solitude and the writing gift from the early years of life. Theories and research on giftedness, loneliness/solitude, and on the links between them suggest that creative literary production and loneliness/solitude are associated. To further illustrate these associations, we briefly discuss loneliness and solitude in the childhood, adult life and work of four gifted writers: Hans Christian Andersen, EdgarAllan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Beatrix Helen Potter. The theoretical framework of this study is twofold: various psychoanalytic formulations and Bruner’s social constructivist and intersubjective conceptualisation of the narrative gift. The main conclusion of this study is that gifted writers have, paradoxically, an intense experience of both painful and beneficial aloneness, which is the inevitable outcome of the writing gift but also becomes the inspiration and motive force for ars poetica.”
Hermette Magaine is a web-based site edited by Risa Mickenberg. Hermette intends to express a femme-centric view of life as an urban hermit or solitaire. Check the description of the website: “The underground newspaper for aspiring they/hermits. The premier anti-social network. Published from an undisclosed location.” The magazine is a quirky, humorous, and refreshingly opinionated site providing a gentle take on urban hermit life.
An important aspect of eremitism in historical China is the evolution of eremitical thought into aesthetic expression as poetry, then painting. Chinese hermit thought is embedded in the historical context of reclusion, wherein officials at court consciously left employment to seek anonymity in distant rural and mountainous settings. By the tenth century Song dynasty era, the poetics and philosophizing associated with eremitic life evolved into painting. The highlight school of painting is the “waters and mountains,” school, sometimes referred to in the West as the “rivers and mountains” school.
Shan Shui is a rich web-based resource, a semi-annual journal of essays and articles by Chinese and Western contributors. Shan Shui describes itself as “Mountain and Water Painting Magazine.” Studies of historical Chinese painting are featured, but the editorial goal is wider and more ambitious:to bring Chinese art, culture, and aesthetics into communication with Western counterparts, broadening the perspective of Chinese art to in order to address nature, philosophy, and understanding.
For more detail see Thatch entry for the same date.