Category: solitude

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Women hermits

Insightful essay for Aeon by Rhianb Sessen on the history of women hermits: “She Wants to Be Alone.” The essay isstructured around important women hermits, from Mary of Egypt, Ji Xian, Sarah Bishop,to AnneLaBastille … and the throwaway line of actress Greta Garbo: “I want to be alone,” which turns out to have actually been “I want to be left alone.”

From the article:

“So why aren’t there more women really alone, women hermits? A hermit, of course, is not just single, not just alone, but alone in a particular way: free from the dizzying pressures and possibilities of public life. The hermit is truly free from acting as lord or master, proprietor or minister, soldier or citizen, serf or king. The hermit is free even from the simple expectations of being a neighbour.

“For women, for most of history, it’s been mother or maiden, daughter or wife. The roles shuffle, their names and details changing, but all share one feature: which man does she care for, which man does she take care of? Woman as defined by man; woman as seen by man. How unappealing. With so few choices, it’s clear why we know of so few women hermits, and why solitude is viewed as male. For women, for most of history, it’s been mother or maiden, daughter or wife. The roles shuffle, their names and details changing, but all share one feature: which man does she care for, which man does she take care of? Woman as defined by man; woman as seen by man. How unappealing. With so few choices, it’s clear why we know of so few women hermits, and why solitude is viewed as male.”

URL: https://aeon.co/essays/is-becoming-a-hermit-the-ultimate-feminist-statement

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Loneliness & Solitude –four articles

from ScienceAlert: “How Solitude Can Be Good – Even Important – For Your Mental Health”
URL: https://www.sciencealert.com/how-solitude-can-be-good-even-important-for-your-mental-health

from QuantaMagazine:”How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain”
URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-loneliness-reshapes-the-brain-20230228/?sponsored=0&position=7&scheduled_corpus_item_id=809ac824-d181-45ff-8f8a-fd78e34e0dc2

from Science Daily via Association for Psychological Science: “Lonely people’s divergent thought processes may contribute to feeling ‘alone in a crowded room'”
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230407124558.htm

from Psychology Today: “You Can Be Alone Without Being Lonely”
URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/turning-straw-into-gold/202303/you-can-be-alone-without-being-lonely

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Macaque social behavior

The Conversation offers this interesting item titled “Macaque monkeys shrink their social networks as they age,” adding the byline “new research suggests evolutionary roots of a pattern seen in elderly people, too.”

Research on 200 macaques living on an islandoff of Puerto Rico revealed that the impetus to reduce social contacts suggested an unconscious motive of propmoting health and avoiding disease in aging. The chief remaining contacts as the monkeys grew older were family and friends.

URL: https://theconversation.com/macaque-monkeys-shrink-their-social-networks-as-they-age-new-research-suggests-evolutionary-roots-of-a-pattern-seen-in-elderly-people-too-196862

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“Life on the Rocks” – film

Life on the Rocks is a 20-minute documentary film about a newsly-wed husband and wife naturalists who spent three years in virtual isolation on a rugged Scottish island studying the bird population. From Psyche Films:

“Two newlyweds carve out a life on a small rock island, among the seabirds

The Bass Rock is a small volcanic island just off the east coast of Scotland. Prominent in the Scottish imagination for its steep terrain and location in the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh, the island has had a sparse and intermittent human population across the centuries. Its most notable and sustained inhabitants are the northern gannets that have dwelled on the island’s jagged cliffs throughout recorded history. With a population of roughly 150,000 birds, their colony is the largest in the world.

The English naturalist June Nelson is one of the few people who have lived on the Bass Rock. For three years in the early 1960s, she and her late husband, the ornithologist Bryan Nelson, who was researching gannets at the University of Oxford, made the island their makeshift home. Living and working out of a small, derelict chapel, they dedicated themselves to observing and recording the behaviours and ecology of the birds. The then-newlyweds had little contact with the outside world, but forged a happy life together, thriving in conditions most would find gruelling.

In the short documentary Life on the Rocks, Nelson revisits her full and focused years on the Bass Rock. Combining sweeping, cinematic black-and-white shots of the island with a string score, the UK director George Pretty crafts a poignant account of Nelson’s cherished time there, as well as her emotional return. Mining Nelson’s memories and old photographs, the film explores how the husband-and-wife team found happiness on this peculiar patch of Earth, and among its many avian inhabitants. But, more than just a fondness for the past, Nelson communicates an impassioned urgency to protect the plummeting global sea-bird population – which has declined by 70 per cent in her lifetime – asking ‘What right have we to deprive [future generations] of this wonderful place?”

URL: https://psyche.co/films/two-newlyweds-carve-out-a-life-on-a-small-rock-island-among-the-seabirds; also available at https://vimeo.com/376345749