Month: January 2020

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Walter Willman, UK hermit, 1930s-1970s

 

Minster FM in the UK offers an item titled: “Brother Walter Willman was a hermit who lived a solitary life in All Saints Church in North street in York.”

The summary: “An obscure English religious hermit was interviewed by BBC in 1961. He had one moment of fame when BBC TV’s Alan Whicker came to meet him in 1961 for the Tonight programme, a sort of One Show of the period.The film has just been put on the BBC Archive Facebook page. [Although the Minster FM item represented by the URL includes the five-minute video.] He had lived on his own since the 1930s in a tiny room and was a rare example of a religious recluse.

It’s thought that he died in the 1970s.”

The BBC interview is available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p098q0zn

URL: https://www.minsterfm.com/news/local/3029814/video—-meet-the-hermit-who-lived-in-york/

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Loneliness viewed

Here are three items addressing solitude and loneliness. Popular treatments often conflate the two, viewing the phenomenon of loneliness as rooted in culpability and mental conditioning, assuming that society is benign and nourishing,and that regular doses of society are required for balance. Partly true for most, probably overrated for others.

“Social Nourishment + Restorative Solitude = Human Thriving” from Psychology Today blog.
URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201912/social-nourishment-restorative-solitude-human-thriving

The Guardian offers “Top 10 Books About Loneliness” mixing literature by women and books on the psychology of loneliness. “A historian of emotion picks the best books about a modern malady.”

  1. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
  2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
  3. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)
  4. A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf (1953)
  5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (first published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas)
  6. Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (1973)
  7. Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T Cacioppo and William Patrick (2009)
  8. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing (2016)
  9. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
  10. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari (2018)

URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/25/top-10-books-about-loneliness

“How to Avoid the Traps that Produce Loneliness and Isolation” in the Washington Post.
URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/02/how-avoid-traps-that-produce-loneliness-isolation/