news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
The Taranaki Daily News reports that Eric Brewer, who has lived on a New Zealand beach as a hermit for 16 years, was evicted from his makeshift dwelling of tarpaulin and driftwood by the local city council today. His story had circulated worldwide via the web recently. Includes video.
URL: http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/8502411/Activity-at-Erics-place
An article in the South China Morning Post suggests a growing concern about adolescents in Hong Kong dropping out of family, school, and social life to become recluses in their homes. The phenomenon is familiar in Japan as hikikomori, or what the article calls otaku, a Japanese term for “home man,” or one who stays at home, presumably playing video games or watching anime.
The term “hidden youth” is also applied. The article title is: “Inside the caged work of Hong Kong’s ‘hidden youths.'”
Most observers attribute the phenomenon to the stress of low expectations among young people aged 16 to 29, chiefly unemployment, which for youth officially runs below ten percent, though other sources say it is as high as 33 percent.
URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1202673/inside-caged-world-hong-kongs-hidden-youths
A forthcoming 2013 book by Gordon Campbell is titled The Hermit in the Garden, published by Oxford University Press. The author talks about the book in a YouTube posted by the press, described as “the cultural decline of the hermit”:
Author Gordon Campbell talks about the imaginary hermits of the eighteenth century, discussing the subsequent cultural void left with the disappearance of the great English houses and the rise of decorative garden gnomes.
The Lykov family of Russian Old Believers survived in isolation in the Siberian taiga for over 40 years before contact with the outer world in the late 1970’s. A Smithsonian article titled “For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II ” presents a fine summary of their life in obscurity and thereafter, with photographs and bibliographical references.
Personal note: The 1992 book by Vasily Peskov titled Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness was one of the first books reviewed when Hermitary launched in 2002: http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/taiga.html
A TDN.com news item titled “Galovin finds peace in trading society for solitude” on a homeless man in Washington State is representative of the potential of homeless people to consciously craft a life of dignity in its simplicity and solitude. The examples of Tom Boyle and Daniel Suelo are pertinent, as is the history of Japanese eremitism.