news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
Catholic news site Aleteia provides a summary article “A pilgrimage to the ‘small cells’ of St. Romuald,” including travelogue-style description and photos of the original Casentino, in the Tuscan Apennines. Though Romuald founded a monastery, he is better known for establishing a hermitage about two miles away, the classic form of desert hermit cells.
URL: https://aleteia.org/2021/06/09/a-pilgrimage-to-the-small-cells-of-st-romuald/
BBC News presents an article, “The US socialite who gave it all up to become a Carmelite nun.” The article recounts the story of Sister Mary Joseph, a Carmelite nun who died recently at age 92. Her story is compelling, “far from traditional.” “Until she dedicated herself to a life of prayer she was known as Ann Russell Miller, a wealthy San Francisco socialite who hosted lavish parties, had season tickets to the opera and was the mother of ten children.”
After her husband’s death, Ann Miller joined the Carmelite order, dropping her hundreds of former friends and her family, her swirling social life and contacts with dozens of philanthropic interests. She lived in cloistered isolation for over thirty years until her recent death. The article details her life, including insights from one of her children.
The Ottawa Citizen (Canada) describes the work of psychologist and Carleton University professor Robert Coplan on the topics of solitude and loneliness. The article,”The Meaning of Solitude,” focuses on the benefits of soloitude. Coplan offers five points about solitude:
1. Beneficial solitude means different things to different people. The key is that it must be something you enjoy that motivates you, said Coplan. “No one can tell you what’s right for you.”
2. Try to find “micro” moments of solitude in a day. Spend 10 minutes on the back porch or go for a walk around the block. Coplan suggests keeping a diary for a week to track time spent alone and the moods these moments produce.
3. Don’t be afraid to let other people know that you need solitude. “It doesn’t reflect on your relationships. It’s a normative need,” he said.
4. You don’t need to be physically alone to enjoy solitude. Some people enjoy solitude in a place where other people are present, such as a park or another public place. Solitude may simply be freedom from other people’s expectations.
5. Solitude may include access to technology, said Coplan. Some people find it necessary to leave their devices at home. Others consider technology necessary to enjoy solitude because they can listen to music or scroll through news websites. However, he advises against looking at other people’s manicured social media posts. Comparing your own reality to other people’s supposedly perfect lives tends to provoke anxiety.
Historian Gordon Campbell, author of The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome, recently lectured on the poem “Il Pensamento” by British poet John Milton, specifically its reference to hermits. Campbell selected the last twenty lines of the poem, the title of which means “The Serious One,” or “The Pensive One.”
The poem represents a transition from Milton’s early Catholic thinking to his conversion to Anglicanism to his radicalization as Puritan — and back again to a Catholic or Anglican sympathy. The latter thinking was for Milton more compatible with his affinity to Melancholy, a popular eighteenth-century attitude among intellectuals and poets, which nostalgia further welcomed the historical hermit. Indeed, in his book, Campbell describes Milton’s poem as “the founding text of the eighteenth-century cult of melancholy.” The cultivation of melancholy conjured a romantic landscape of hermits, though it did not directly advocate eremitism.
URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/public-lectures/summer-2021/milton-hermit/
The COVID pandemic has stimulated essays, blog posts, and ruminations on solitude and loneliness for iover a year, but often uneven, unfulfilled, and unconnected to larger themes. Many of these sincere efforts miss opportunities to express larger contexts.
Once in a while, a good connection to a classic or universal writer, poet, thinker, or theme is most welcome. An example is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation essay on solitude and the Auistrian poet Rilke, titled “‘Live the questions now’: Reading Rilke in a time of uncertainty, grief and solitude.”
The essay pursues poets, writers, solitaries, and suffering people, following the course of solitude in their lives and the balm of discovering Rilke and the theme of giving oneself “permission for solitude.”
Read or listen to the near-hour program.