Author: Meng-hu

American expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles (1910-1999) once wrote a little travel essay titled “Baptism of Solitude.” The essay describes what he tells us the French call le bapteme de la solitude, referring to the unique sensation of encountering the desert, specifically the Sahara Desert, whether for the “first or the tenth time.” The essay opens:

Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns, and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resembling the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway.

The absence of sound, which is silence, is only part of a natural component of solitude.

Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape.

Bowles describes the sky at night, which though filled with stars is never quite dark but “an intense and burning blue.” And there is nothing else, especially leaving the town, the camels, and going up into the dunes, or out on a stone ledge, leaving everything behind. The peculiar sensation — if the viewer does not rush back inside — is a desire to linger, to stay.

It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.

The rest of the essay goes on to describe the social life of Arabs, Touaregs, Sudanese and Mauritanian blacks, and the French in the Sahara before Algeria independence. Bowles describes the wonderful oases and their verdant orchards and grainfields, the extremes of day and night temperatures, the rare but turbulent rainfalls, the effect of the desert on the White Fathers — the religious order of missionaries who ended up acquiring “a certain healthy and unorthodox fatalism.” The essay is a consummate piece of travel literature.

“Baptism of Solitude” does not pursue the historical meaning of the desert. It is an introduction for moderns and Westerners, but anyone acquainted with the early Christian desert hermits will fill in the psychological side that Bowles’ descriptive and suggestive essay begins to describe. He comes to the edge of this vast topic of desert solitude, of the absoluteness it represents, aware that his reader can only come so far with him. So Bowles concludes about what going to the desert ought to suggest to a modern-minded person.

Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price.

Bowles recorded a reading of this essay in 1994 at his home in Tangiers. The sense of Bowles’ essay and spoken words are imaginatively captured by a 2000 short graphic film “Baptism Of Solitude: A Tribute To Paul Bowles” by Tonya Hurley, available on YouTube.

A famous koan of The Book of Serenity titled “Dizang Planting the Fields” is prefaced by this setting: the 9th century Chan master Guichen, called “Dizang” because he resided at the Dizang temple once for a little while, is visited by Xiushan, Fayan, and others, who are traveling from the south but whose journey is interrupted by rain, snow, and overflowing streams. They stop at Dizang’s temple. They sit about the brazier, ignoring master Dizang.

Dizang draws closer and says quietly: “May I ask something?” Xiushan looks up and says yes. Dizang asks, “Are the mountains, rivers, and earth identical or separate from your elders?”

Xiushan replies to Dizang, with a tentative voice or perhaps a self-assured one: “Separate.” Dizang holds up two fingers. “Identical! Identical!” Xiushan blurts out. Dizang holds up two fingers again. Then he gets up and leaves.

Once out of earshot, Fayan asks Xiushan what is the meaning of the two fingers. Xiushan replies cooly that Dizang did it artibrarily. It has no meaning. “Don’t insult him,” says Fayan. “Bah,” says Xiushan, “are there elephant’s tusks in a rat’s mouth?”

The next day, the visitors leave, but Fayan tells Xiushan that he is going to stay, that he will catch up with the others if he decides otherwise. But Fayan stays a long time.

This is only the preface to the story, but the personalities are already clearly delineated for what follows. Fayan studied with Dizang a long time. It happened that Xiushan and the others came to Dizang’s temple again. We can imagine the same setting, sitting around the brazier. Dizang speaks first, again.

“You are from the South?” “Yes.” “How is Buddhism in the South these days?” Xiushan replies “There’s a lot of discussion going on.” Dizang asks, “How can that compare to me here planting the fields and eating rice?”

What Dizang intends by the question about Buddhism in the south is to confirm that Xiushan now understood what he did not before, that now he could speak for himself. But instead Xiushan boasted of the busy debate and scholarship going on there, presumably including himself as part of it.

Next Dizang wanted to reveal the nature of all this vain discussion in the south, to at least hear a defense of it, and so refers to his own meagre efforts, his diurnal planting of the fields, which is both figurative and literal. It is to him the essence of practice, in contrast to discussion.

But Xiushan does not accept what Dizang does, and replies, “How about the world?” In other words, Xiushan dismisses Dizang’s activity as the heart of Buddhism and practice. He scorns it as something primitive in contrast to the discussion going on in the south, and by extension in the civilized world. Is this what you are doing while the world does important things? Xiushan suggests.

Dizang responds, “What do you call the world?” How does Xiushan define the “world”? Is it larger, better, deeper, than simply planting the fields and eating its yield? Dizang might have given up on Xiushan’s badgering train of talk and simply said something to the effect that, well, that’s what I do here; it doesn’t matter. Xiushan would not catch on either way.

Most commentary on this story concentrates on the distinction between discussion (communion of speech) and practice (communion with the source). From there the various stages of enlightenment in the Chan/Zen tradition may be discussed, or the use of scriptures and sutras versus meditation. But all this, too, would consist of discussion. The very institution of temples and monasteries, as in the West, eventually led to the creation of a class of meditators and a class of workers, with the latter indoors and performing minimal labor, a severe dichotomy.

But the story of Dizang points directly to the essence of practice as found in the hermits of antiquity. The Commentary in The Book of Serenity:

Even though planting the fields and making rice is ordinary, unless you investigate to the full you don’t know their import. The ancients would reap and boil chestnuts and rice at the edge of a hoe, in a broken-legged pot, deep in the mountains — their fortune was no more than contentment; all their lives they never sought from anyone. Their nobility was no more than purity and serenity — what need for bushels of emblems? … It’s not necessary to open a hall and expound the teachings as in the South. Leave the clamor …

The 20th-century Japanese photographer Masehisa Fukase’s book of haunting photographs published as Karasu or Ravens reasserted a traditional view of ravens as symbol of darkness and death. Fukase’s photographs of ravens in various grains of black and white evoke at once a sense of unease, repulsion, pity, and despair — as intended. The 1980’s English translation of the work as The Solitude of Ravens further captured the sense of alienation, strangeness, the status of pariah, outcast, of deformity and repulsion.

In ancient Celtic and Norse mythology, the raven fits this symbolism. The ravens’ apparent maleficence derived from their habits as scavengers consuming carrion, especially on gory battlefields. In Irish mythology, the war-goddess Morrigan haunted the battlefields in the form of a raven. The war-drenched Norse similarly filled their mythology with ravens as devices. Though modern populaces have largely sanitized their witnessing of the horrors of war even while wars rage on, the symbolism of ravens lingers.

But ought not the raven’s alleged maleficence be attributable as much to the architects of war and not to opportune birds with an evolutionary niche? Are not eagles, like vultures, likewise scavengers? The presence of ravens anywhere intensifies the mystery of human behavior and the darkness inhabited by the unconscious mind.

In literary terms, Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” served to extend the macabre association of ravens with death. But Poe mingled death with the quest for wisdom and equanimity. The raven symbolized knowledge in ancient Greek culture, and the raven in the poet’s chamber alights on a bust of Athena, goddess of knowledge. Understanding the raven is to grasp an insight into existence.

In contrast, however, is the raven depicted in Western Christianity. In this tradition the raven is presented in a positive light, associated with saints. Here the raven’s submission to the will of God despite its disagreeable habits is an expression of redemption. The stories of ravens in Christian tradition indicate that however objectionable the behavior of any creature, it can ultimately pursue what is good. In doing so, the reader or listener cannot but admit the benignity of nature and creation.

Here are some depictions of ravens in Christian tradition:

In the Old Testament, ravens feed the prophet and hermit Elijah with “bread and meat” where there was no other source of sustenance.

In St. Jerome’s story of Anthony meeting the famous desert hermit Paul a raven is featured prominently. It fulfills God’s purpose as a sign of holiness. Paul greets his visitor thusly:

“Behold the man whom yon have sought with so much toil, his limbs decayed with age, his gray hairs unkempt. You see before you a man who were long will be dust. But love endures all things. Tell me therefore, I pray you, how fares the human race? Are new homes springing up in the ancient cities? What government directs the world? Are there still some remaining for the demons to carry away by their delusions?”

Thus conversing they noticed with wonder a raven which had settled on the bough of a tree, and was then flying gently down till it came and laid a whole loaf of bread before them. They were astonished, and when it had gone, “See,” said Paul, “the Lord truly loving, truly merciful, has sent us a meal. For the last sixty years I have always received half a loaf: but at your coming Christ has doubled his soldier’s rations.

According to tradition, a raven regularly visited St. Benedict of Nursia to receive a bit of bread. One day, Benedict was given poisoned bread by a jealous monk. He implored the raven to take it away and conceal it. The raven did so, not eating it, and returned shortly thereafter for its regular morsel.

The 9th century hermit St. Meinrad, who regularly fed ravens, was murdered by thieves. Ravens pursued the murderers into the forest, their loud caws alerting the villagers to come and apprehend the men. (The Benedictine monastery of Einsiedeln, associated with Meinrad, used ravens in its coat of arms).

These Christian stories of ravens may not have reversed popular perceptions of ravens but have two virtues: 1) they point to a sense of benignity in creation, and 2) in each instance, ravens are associated positively with the solitary and with places of solitude.

How can the sense of benignity towards ravens exemplified by these tales outweigh the image of the raven associated with the oppression of war and destruction that is so intense in our consciousness, a restless despair, hopelessness, and unease?

Fukase precisely taps this uneasiness. It is not necessary to be on a battlefield to feel this way. Life is a battlefield as far as the subconscious is concerned. We only need a negative symbol to provoke the unease. The ravens in warfare, ancient or modern, provoke it. Even the ravens going about their lives, as Fukase shows.

Or do we dare go one step further? Is creation plagued by humans the same way that ravens plague our dreams? Solitude in Fukase is both the condition of ravens but also the projection of our uneasiness.

We cannot picture the hermit, regardless of tradition, turning his back on any creature. On the contrary, we can imagine the hermit, in solitude, identifying with the raven — shunned, provoking disgust, reduced to ignominy. The hermit stories strive to transcend our human fears, even as we acknowledge the entrenched causes of human misery emanating not from ravens but from the human heart.

How one treats the innocent, the simple, and the helpless reveals one’s character and moral aptitude. The historical hermit, deliberately shunning that which the world values most, becomes by default ignorant, innocent, simple, and helpless.

But the hermit is strong, persistent, conscious, and willful by worldly standards — more willful because of the status of calling, personality, and the vicissitudes of eremitism contrasting to the world.

This duality of characteristics makes the hermit capable of both being and identifying with the simple, yet capable of being and identifying with the motives of intelligence, spirituality, acculturation, harmony, equanimity — those virtues which the poor are often incapable of attaining or expressing in their ignorance, and which the powerful are equally incapable of in their stubbornness.

Thus the hermit partakes of two worlds, lives between two worlds. Or, rather, the hermit lives in neither world, fitting neither but thrown in between. The hermit culls the values of simplicity from the values of the one world (requiring a necessary education, sophistication, or spiritual sensitivity) but leaves off the instinctive dullness and torpid animality of the simple poor in their misery. (How often have many poor people said that they want to be rich, that they hate simplicity.)

Thus the hermit seizes upon the intellectual and cultural strengths of the powerful, the worldly-wise perspicacity of the glib and educated, the aptitude to deftly glide through complexities of daily life characteristic of the powerful, only shunning their coldness, their materiality, their inability to understand their own situation and that of others.

The hermit is burdened by this complexity of experiences, insights, reflections, decisions, motives — yet eventually distilling self and others into a functional simplicity. The hermit is a reduction in quantity, entanglements, obligations, compromises, expectations, and aspirations.

But the “reductionism” of the hermit is not a chopping off or plucking out — though most people need to be crudely radical in order to discipline themselves for life in society, in order to survive with any degree of integrity. It is a realization in the hermit born of observation, personality and life encounters.

The hermit is always a becoming, not quite through but never lacking contentment. Eremitism is a “beingness” never quite filled but always shaping and adjusting itself, always set aside from, disengaged from, anything that might identify itself too closely to him or her. Thus even in the discipline of religion or the questioning of philosophy, the hermit takes all the best, the richest, the most nuanced, but does not concede the core of self, of heart, to the structures contrived by man. Thus has the hermit always been looked upon suspiciously by authorities and by others who conform to them, for the very vocation of hermit threatens not only daily life and society but the premises of having to institutionalize spiritual and moral responses to society.

The hermit lives within two worlds or simultaneously on two ends of the spectrum (an impossible feat by worldly standards!) One end of the spectrum is perfect conformity and reproduction of what society mandates in consumption of food, appearance, thought, reading, viewing, thinking, environment. On the other end of the spectrum is dysfunction: madness, mental or physical illness, instability, lack of sustaining and redeeming abilities put to common use.

That this spectrum is false is not proven by anything in the world. Indeed, scientists, economists, psychotherapists, enforcers of power — all agree on the two poles of the spectrum and how everyone must inhabit one or the other. But throughout history, hermits have inhabited both — or neither. Only the hermit (and the mystic and the sage) show that the spectrum is false, that there is no context to its extremes, that nature is the flow between and around them, dissolving them.

The hermit looks beyond the creatures, even beyond himself or herself as one of the myriad creatures, to the context, to that which is the medium of life, energy, being — not the individual instance, which is a moment’s flesh, grass, froth on the water. The context reveals the useless efforts of those who cling to the poles of the spectrum, the poles they have themselves erected, the poles that they have been given or assigned and which they view as precious.

This context is what the Tao te ching or Lao-tzu calls the Way, as in chapter 4:

The way is empty, yet use will not drain it.
Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures.

What do the worldly do, panicking in this emptiness, drowning in this fullness? The Way is alien to them and challenges both the turpitude of the poor and the sophistication of the rich. Neither wants to stand before it with open eyes. But the hermit responds to the difficulties of understanding the Way, pursuing the sage’s advice:

Blunt the sharpness;
Untangle the knots;
Soften the glare:
Let your wheels move only along old ruts.

The last line above is the D. C. Lau translation. Ursula LeGuin, in her transliterative method, puts it thus: “The way is the dust of the way” — we are merely following the sages, we cannot pretend to innovation; there is nothing new, yet what does the world constantly seek but the new.

The world is dark in the intensity of its savagery and in the parsimoniousness of its contentments. But at least, cry the worldly, there is something palpable, something they can embrace to drain like a cup and then smash to the earth. That is the conviction of the despairing, whether what they want is political power or just a moment of pleasure. They do not see what is before them.

Darkly visible, it [the Way] seems as if it were there.

Not that the hermit (or mystic, or sage) presumes to have grasped the Way, tamed it, controlled it, deciphered its secrets. But this very elusiveness contrasts with the arrogant certainty of the worldly, their certainty, at any rate, of this moment’s ambition and the next moment’s goal. But there is little more beyond that, and the next moment was all that they planned for. The hermit does not presume to grasp the next moment, or the one after, for the next moment is only part of the continuum that is the whole, that is the Way. And not grasping it definitively, how can it be circumscribed by words, gestures, and desires?

I know not whose progeny it is.
It images the progenitor of the all things.

Lau says God and LeGuin says “the gods.” We assume that something begets reality, but once in the continuum, we are without beginning or end, only wondering where the way came from, or if it is the same as the creature who asks the question.

Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha has many applications to the interests of eremitism.

But Satyagraha must be understood in the intrinsic sense that Gandhi himself conceived of it — he first coined the word and the idea in South Africa, later applying it to the situation in India. Even Gandhi himself went beyond its activist component in configuring his concept.

Satyagraha has been variously understood, as even Gandhi himself realized. It was identified as passive resistance and as non-violent resistance. Gandhi objected to the notion of passivity and its connotation of weakness and a lack of conscious effort. Similarly, the idea of resistance suggested an element of aggressiveness that contradicted non-violence. Gandhi preferred “non-cooperation” because it was both conscious effort and a sense of disengagement from evil that was to be achieved through spiritual and moral force, an inner force cultivated by the individual.

The concept of civil disobedience Gandhi derived in part from Thoreau; the articulation of non-violence was derived in part from Tolstoy. Gandhi’s synthesis with Hindu thought — also influenced by the Christian Gospels, Jainism, and Buddhism — was the application of what he called “soul-force” or “truth-force.” (The Sanskrit word sat means “truth”.) Gandhi believed that the fullest expression of Satyagraha was capable of revolutionizing society, let alone the individual, as an essential ethics.

Carried out to its utmost, Satyagraha is independent of pecuniary or other material assistance, certainly, even in its elementary form, of physical force or violence. Indeed, violence is the negation of this great spiritual force, which can only be cultivated or wielded by those who will entirely eschew violence. … Only those who realize that there is something in man which is superior to the brute nature in him … can effectively be Satyagrahas.

This minimal (to the perennial view) renunciation of violence represents the first renunciation of both society’s ways and the ways of human instinct. But Gandhi goes much further.

The use of this force requires the adoption of poverty, in the sense that we must be indifferent whether we have the wherewithal to feed or clothe ourselves.

This passage is reminiscent of the Gospel injunction about not worrying how we are to clothe ourselves or what we are to eat, witnessing the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. For Gandhi, as for the historical Jesus, the goal of the sages’ work is to tap the spiritual power of community and a trust in like-minded others to assist and ally themselves together in mutual aid. Historically, the ancient monasteries of all creeds have maintained this principle as a structural foundation. Secular ideologies professing the same or similar goals have often fallen short because of the lack of a spiritual element in their structure, and in the minds of adherents. To extend a spiritual mindset to the laity and the masses, ambitious as such a project was, reflected Gandhi’s pure-hearted application of the goals of the historical Jesus, a goal ironically at odds with institutional Christianity, as he so often (but politely) pointed out.

Gandhi identified eleven vows for those who would reside at his Sabarmati ashram as representative Satyagrahi:

• Truth
• non-violence
• non-possession
• chastity
• fearlessness
• control of the palate
• Non-stealing
• bread-labor
• religious equality
• anti-untouchability
• swadeshi (use of locally-produced)

Gandhi conceives of Truth as primary among the virtues, its pursuit representing not abstract knowledge or philosophizing but truthfulness in every aspect of life, such that one’s life is an emblem of what it would mean to follow God — whatever God is considered by the individual. Always the individual is engaged to pursue this truth in every dimension of daily life. Everything falls into place once this effort is foremost, realized by what the Bhagavad Gita calls abhyasa (single-mindedness) and vairagya (indifference to all other interests in life). Gandhi does not want an ability to reason so much as an adherence to a path that, once in practice, yields individual fruits on many varying kinds, depending on personality and potential.

The pursuit of Truth, in setting all behaviors right, may involve self-suffering. Gandhi calls these tapas, literally “austerities,” historical undergone voluntarily by those who would become more spiritual. Hence the pursuit of truth means anticipating self-discipline, even to the point of suffering. By anticipating suffering, the individual can prepare to meet it with strength and selflessness.

“The pursuit of Truth is true bhakti (devotion),” wrote Gandhi. Although the Hindu path of devotion is usually distinguished from other forms — jnana (intellectual), kriya and hatha (yoga), karma (selfless work), raja (synthesis), bhakti is ususally identified with outer devotion in chant, rites, and external practices such as puja, prayer, and worship. But Gandhi here takes this externality of traditional bhakti and seeks to transform it to an externality of ethical strength and moral fortitude exemplified by the actions of Satyagraha. Thus, perhaps, the attitude of devotion in the Satyagraha was the new synthesis traditionally reserved to the intellectual brahmins. Like Gandhi’s condemnation of untouchability — a most direct confrontation with the old traditions of Hinduism and Indian society — the new notion of Satyagraha was a revolutionary one.

Finally, Gandhi identifies the path of daily life lived in the pursuit of Truth with the virtue of refraining from violence or ahimsa (doing no harm). Where ahimsa may have originated in the restraint of ancient animal sacrifice, and adopted the Jain view of non-violence to sentient beings, Gandhi characteristically went beyond.

Ahimsa is not the crude thing it has been made to appear. Not to hurt any living thing is no doubt a part of ahimsa. But it is its least expression. The principle of ahimsa is hurt by every evil thought, by undue haste, by lying, by hatred, by wishing ill to anybody. It is also violated by our holding on to what the world needs. … Satyagraha excludes the use of violence in any shape or form, whether in thought, speech, or deed.

“What the world needs” should be studied in order to distinguish for ourselves what is really needful.

The other aspects of what Gandhi expected of a Satyagraha are not unusual in considering religious and ascetic groups and individuals. That they should have a high level of self-discipline in body, mind, and spirit for lay people was a striking concept. But the scale of expectation was not entirely dependent on private actions. Gandhi’s directives concerning social action — fasting, picketing, visiting jails, confronting violence, etc. — were unprecedented, as was the soul-force driving his activism. Wrote Gandhi: “I am making an experiment in ahimsa on a scale perhaps unknown in history.”

It is for the aspirant to simplicity and wisdom to find the essential points in Gandhi’s beliefs and practices that can be applied to the life path. In our modern era, the traditional directives combine with others to have new relevance, such as non-possession, labor, and use of what is locally produced (localvore).

That gardening teaches life lessons is, perhaps, trite. Truisms usually are. They have been observed for a long time, after all. Gardening teaches patience, forbearance, a sense of order and sequence. Gardening requires attention to detail, attention to environs, and the notion of working with rather than working against.

Gardening for food and gardening for aesthetics need not conflict but there is an urgency about growing food that can reduce the pleasure of gardening. Gardening for food veers towards farming and agriculture, where success means livelihood or profit. To garden is an avocation, while growing food is a business — that is the dangerous attitude towards which one can slide if gardening gets too serious. The pleasure of growing not food but, say, flowers and landscape plants, on the other hand, must be governed by aesthetics as much as science or logic, but can seem without practical end. For this there is the edible landscape. Permiculture takes into account the interplay of needs in the life of microbes, insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and humans. That is the ideal. Many of these gardening styles are the revival of traditional methods but with a new philosophy born out of witnessing the ugly and destructive habits of recent time. A guiding principle is that of belonging with, of working with.

Growing organically is like living organically, always conscious of self and environs. Thus, finding an insect on a food plant ought to be informative, not a source of panic — another lesson. Insects tell us about our environment, about the quality of the soil, about the health of the plant. If the garden is healthy, the appearance of a pest will be followed by the appearance of a beneficial insect. Again, a lesson for life.

The overriding lesson is the cycle of nature, the give and take, the time for this and the time for that. Done too early, we fail, too late and the same result. Even when gardening in optimum conditions, something in nature may challenge or overthrow everything. Or we may be overly scrupulous, or take too much for granted, both with bad consequences. The cycle of the garden is the cycle of life. We cannot oppose it; we ought to work in harmony with it.

Here is a digression on primitivism, the psychology of which appears at first helpful in dissecting the ills of modern society, but which takes us in an unbalanced direction. Primitivism rues the desolation of modern civilization but traces its roots to agriculture. According to this theory, agriculture collectivized free individuals under a central authority bound to be abusive, corrupting, and destructive. Agriculture was mass production to service the elite. Agriculture was a necessary condition for the leisure of the elite, which is to say, for the products of civilization.

But the hunter-gatherer state posited as the original free state of human beings is itself — like agriculture in this scenario — not the peaceful coexistence with nature here supposed. The small tribes and groups who roamed the forests and plains hunting animals would itself be the microcosm of control that primitivism abhors. The killing and consuming of animals in this scenario is not only violent in itself but makes for social values based on violence and control of others. The small numbers of primordial peoples presumably meant that society was structured horizontally and that discontented individuals could easily leave and attach themselves to other groups. But those individuals with what today would be called “leadership skills” would inevitably amass possessions, lord it over others, and soon create a system of control. Would not such a system quickly evolve into centralized authority and create agriculture? Is not the root of civilization’s woes intrinsic to human beings rather than to agriculture or any other collective practice?

The contemporary primitivist probably may, then, reluctantly grow plants for food in the garden, daydreaming about primordial and wandering peoples. The primitivist’s scenario is often used today to justify the consuming of animals and animal products. The roundabout method is a backyard or farm setting with animals to consume, which however, still mimics agriculture, though, of course, the “free-range” idea is far removed from the factory farm and the slaughterhouse. Or is it? A radical notion of the autonomy of animals would prefer not to capture and kill them when other foods, healthier and at less environmental cost, are readily available. But to enter the whole debate on this topic is beyond the scope of these notes. Suffice to say that there remains an odd incongruity to the argument that animals and plants are the same when treated as food. End of digression.

The Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka offered “natural farming” as the paradigm in his book The One Straw Revolution. Fukuoka’s method and scale essentially resolves the dilemma of growing plants for food without becoming agriculture. That this practice would revolutionize modern society and culture is clear. His presentation has no weaknesses other than challenging a whole system of feeding billions. The revolution is not so much in how to grow food as in how to wrest wealth and power from the keepers of technology. As in other spheres of modern life, agriculture delegates to a set of powerful interests all the control and methods of food production, representing the loss of self-sufficiency and community sensibility. To follow Fukuoka’s paradigm is to drop agriculture, but not to destroy the fruits of civilization.

Perhaps the form of gardening that most evokes a sense of creativity is not related to food-growing. Not mythical Eden, though perhaps the showcase gardens of Shalamar or the Alhambra overlap. The aesthetics of such non-food gardens is an expression of wealth and status. Far less creative are the luxuriant English lawns of which moderns are so fond. The vast spans were merely expressions of wealth, displays of disdain for those who must use their property to grow food, versus the rich who ostentatiously exhibit their excess space as a byproduct of their money and power. They need not stoop to growing their own food. Add topiary to amuse a certain taste. Perhaps an ornamental hermit, as in the luxurious estates of 18th-century Britain. Coupled with modern agriculture and monopoly practices, there is enough offense to engender peasant revolts, wherein land is considered precious if but utilitarian. The romantic would not have calloused hands but would sympathize.

The Japanese garden carries an aesthetics that reflects life. The arrangements are made to conform with, if not outright mimic, nature and natural settings. There is more philosophy in this art than ostentatious display, and that is a redeeming factor. Indeed, the aesthetics may jar the Western sensibility. For while the owners of Japanese gardens were perhaps social and economic counterparts of European luxury gardens, the philosophy differs in evoking not human or civilized presence. Where the European garden is unmistakeably contrived to boast of a human author or arranger, the Japanese garden, in keeping with Eastern culture, seeks to efface its designer, to withdraw the sense of human intervention, and to project only nature (admittedly as conceived by the designer), or the essence of what nature is. The Sakuteiki of Tachibana no Toshitsuna, the 11th-century manual on garden design, is the basic text on principles of the Japanese garden.

Japanese gardens evolved from the wealthy stroll garden to the ascetic meditation garden, to the functional tea garden. While the Sakuteiki was partly inspired by Chinese belief in what is today called Feng Shui, it is based more on indigenous Shinto belief, wherein spiritual beings inhabit all natural objects, and the interplay of natural forces from wind and light, to water and rocks, soil and plants, are to be captured and expressed in the garden’s design. A guiding justification for bringing nature close to the person’s dwelling is that few people can go out to natural settings and reside therein. Says Toshitsuna: “We should always remember that it is not practical for ordinary people to live in the depths of the mountains.” Most people are not going to become hermits, so a garden can at least bring the insights of nature to the average person, at least to some degree.

Thus, every detail of the Sakuteiki is an attempt to recreate the hermit’s natural setting. Stones are of particular relevance, the culmination of design and the infusion of spirit into the garden. They are balanced because nature is balanced. Because nature shifts light, water, and wind, but stones tend to stay where they are, Toshitsuna calls for the arrangement of stones to carry a sense of permanence and balance, but also of movement and animation:

If there are “running away” stones there must by “chasing” stones. If there are “leaning” stones there must by “supporting” stones. If there are “assertive” stones there must be “yielding” stones. If there are “upward-looking” stones there must be “downward-looking” stones. If there are “vertical” stones there must be “horizontal” stones.

Toshitsuna gives credence to the notion that Taoism influencesd Zen as much as Buddhism.

The Sakuteiki ends with a discourse on what is now called a Zen garden, which Toshitsuna called a “dry” garden or landscape: karesansui. Here Toshitsuna speaks almost exclusively of stones, and the reverence toward stones reflects the Shinto heritage of treating all natural objects, animate or inanimate, with respect. Not unlike ancient Celtic thought, the indigenous Japanese considered stones of particular interest as expressions of life and spirit — not merely impressive stones like the Celts might have preferred in the monoliths of a previous era (like Stonehenge) but in the smallest contemporary stones, too.

The Zen garden recreates a mountain or hillside without water, concentrating on the core of nature as emptiness. It is distinct from the food garden or other pleasure garden. Another lesson: all of them are different and address different aspects of nature and ourselves.

The lessons of gardening are limitless. Toshitsuna himself admits, at the close of his book, that he has tried to present many ideas about gardens and designs, but there are many other possibilities, including many, he admits, “too profound for me.” In this we can only agree.

The word “scandal” derives from the notion of climbing out of a trap or snare. The word is ambiguous because the trap is usually of the person’s own doing, though it is a situation observable by others and therefore offense to them and to their moral expectations. Scandal suggests a double offense — the offense or transgression in itself and the ignominy of its public revelation. The latter may have greater impact on other aspects of the scandalous one’s life and situation, since it is usually tied to one in office or highly placed in an institution of high repute or trust.

Scandal suggests that the high level of repute or trust is meritorious and deserved, rather than part of a narrow and contrived arrangement of people with power. In this light, every institution will potentially have scandals because every institution contrives a moral purpose beyond its actual capabilities. The scandalized have accepted the premise, expect the high purpose to be true, and hover on the brink of hope and insecurity in placing the bulk of their moral investment and emotional well-being on a given institution or set of people.

Why do scandals regularly convulse institutions and groups? It is too facile to say that they are only human, to say that they are individuals who misrepresent the high calling of the institution. Looked at sociologically, it is impossible not to take into account the fact of an institutional setting. Whether it is religious, financial, political — scandal is built into the nature of the social relations that mesh with institutions of power. The very nature of groups consists of vertical structures assuring an environment of power inherited and power dispensed. This structure breeds scandal.

Neither time nor geography spare structures of scandal. Power itself is the root of both the institution and the scandal.

The opposite of scandal is innocence, and innocence contrasted with the world is powerlessness. Thus scandal involves the powerful and the powerless, and the relationship is inevitably symbiotic. Here innocence does not mean ignorance or naivete but the state of nature, of childhood unresolved by reason, of conscious renunciation or suppression of ego. Thus scandal is depicted as offense to those who have with innocence placed their trust in the powerful — although it is not innocence but naivete and ignorance when the public is scandalized. The public, we are reminded, ought to know better. But the mind and heart of the public often envies the powerful rather than opposes them. The expectation that the public will revolt at scandal as a sign of deeper moral trouble is gainsaid by the inevitable misinterpretation of cause and effect.

Scandals can be enumerated to infinitude. That is because power and its human contrivances can be enumerated to infinitude. Religious scandals, financial scandals, political scandals — are they not centered in the very corridors of ultimate power? What wisdom is needed to come to this conclusion?

The personality of the hermit must be conscious of the instinct for power. By definition, eremitism and solitude connote a renunciation of power, for power must be built up and exercised over others in order to provide the pleasurable feedback of its success. But even within the solitary self, the instinct for power can rise in pride, self-assurance, and self-satisfaction. In every case, a self must exist in order to understand itself and the world — at which point, seeing power, that self disengages. The hermit, whether in the world or not, is essentially a figure that does not seek power. The eremitic task is to find ways of living that continually disengage from power. To some hermits, such a life is threatened by living in society; to others, anonymity and privacy is sufficient.

The spectrum of emotions, like a pendulum, does not bring peace to the hermit. The spectrum is understood to be two aspects of life, two sides that complement one another, two faces looking forward and backward. It is these extremes on the emotional spectrum that must be stilled. Between joy and sorrow, power and weakness, propriety and scandal, must be a different standard for which the hermit strives.

And yet, the two ends of the spectrum which the swinging pendulum strike, driving back to the middle, only to sweep on to the other extreme, cannot be easily reconciled. The middle is not a reconciliation of extremes but an uneasy compromise. It is not moderation, for the middle does not stand still. The new standard must not be a tepidness of effort to desperately try to stay in balance, but an active reflection on what sort of life is best. Here disengagement is a profoundly radical act and requires courage, strength, and assertiveness of a strong — that is, conscious — self. The middle is for the scandalized, the naive, and the ignorant. The pendulum is for those clinging to time and desire. The hermit breaks through both with what Eckhart called “releasement.”

And so the hermit becomes in many epochs the scandal. Those who point out the evil, who denounce the scandal, are often seen as radical and dangerous. The hermit does not do so vocally but will be thought to be doing so by example. To maintain silence, to turn away, is interpreted as an offense, a disdain, an arrogance. That is why the desert, the mountain, the forest, were the preferred settings of so many historical hermits who realized how difficult it is to be a hermit in the world. The Taoist ideal of the hermit in the city presupposed a supportive philosophy, even an esotericism, that made such a life possible, even in a culture that tolerated and even celebrated hermits. But in the West, hermits were often pursued if not persecuted, often deemed mad and requiring control. The hermit was the scandal and not the institutions.

What the scandalized need to recognize is the spectrum of emotion, the spectrum of existence, especially in the form of a pendulum that swings between propriety and scandal, the appearance of good and the appearance of harm. They are all of a part because they are made essential by social needs, by institutionalizing of power. To be free of power is to be free of dichotomy.

Dichotomy makes us complicit with power and scandal, with good and harm, with life and death. Grasping the effects of dichotomy we can begin the project of understanding.

Kahlil Gibran offers a sense of this dichotomy in The Prophet:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Freud was not the first to systematically study dreams, and credits several predecessors in his own The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). But Freud was the first to claim a systematic analysis of the meaning of dreams and to provide a code for deciphering them, if not actually interpreting them. He took the theories of dream origins — external sensory stimuli, internal sensory excitations, and internal organic somatic stimuli — and went one step further by identifying psychic sources of stimuli and distinguishing manifest and latent content.

Freud’s famous conclusion was that “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” Unlike his predecessors who saw dreams as a kind of bodily detritus, Freud insisted that dreams

are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is asleep while another portion is beginning to wake. On the contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete validity — fulfillments of wishes; they can be inserted into the chain of intelligible waking mental acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.

Dreams are like fairy tales, which present symbols to fit preconceived meanings. However, dreams are distorted narratives hedging against unpleasant reality, a disguise to the dreamer. Thus Freud refines his definition to indicate that a dream is “a disguised fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.” This disguising Freud calls “censorship.”

The content of dreams is memory, from the impressions of the day as recent memory to impressions going back to childhood which seem on the conscious every-day level to be trivial. It is at this point that Freud declares no dream material to be “innocent” — all dream material is sexual in nature. Thus dream content represents suppressed and forbidden wishes of childhood, such as in the dream of the death of a person of whom the dreamer is fond, revealing Oedipal content or sibling rivalry.

Freud is usually identified as placing sexual factors exclusively at the forefront of psychological explanations. But it is true that he was referring to neurotics and, in part, to his own dreams. Freud does use dream content as a means of identifying dream mechanisms and does open a method for understanding broader symbolism in dreams. But he did not budge from his conclusion about the sexual nature of dreams. To go beyond that was the work of others, such as Jung. Freud had neither the means, time, or disposition, to explore remnant instincts in the human mind, though he eventually identified broader concepts of life and death forces, to which sexual factors could be subsumed. But at the turn of the century, some 40+ years of age, Freud made conclusions that he did not and could not pursue directly or clinically. Thus has he been called a philosopher of dreams as much as an analyst.

Among dream mechanisms are 1) condensation (of time and space), 2) censorship, 3) displacement (of psychical intensities), and 4) representation (of causal relations). These are now familiar mechanisms. The latent content or dream-thoughts are transformed to dream-content or manifest content through visual images, which in turn become symbolic actions. The symbols, as identified by the dream interpreter, are derived in part from the study of myth, folklore, legends, and — Freud adds pointedly — jokes. Writes Freud, “Dreams make use of this symbolism for the disguised representation of their latent thoughts.”

But Freud returns to the sexual nature of dreams in elaborating on symbolism. To him, every object in a dream is a symbol, specifically a sexual one. Thus elongated objects versus containerized objects, horizontal versus vertical, and so forth. No wonder that Freud himself admits of “no possibility of explaining dreams” [emphasis his], but an admission by which he only means that no explanation is really necessary since the narrative of the dream can be reduced to symbolic formula, decoded, as it were. The processes and mechanisms could be identified clearly enough, but only psychoanalysis and a knowledge of the individual’s past could reveal facts that would allow for interpreting dreams.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind [emphasis his]. By analyzing dreams we can take a step forward in our understanding of the composition of that most marvelous and most mysterious of all instruments. Only a small step, no doubt; but a beginning.

Tempering his conclusion, Freud reminds the reader that he is concerned with the pathological and the neurotic, with what he called functional illnesses. He did not back away from a somewhat crude explanatory symbolism at this point. Only later did he refine a universal explanation for behavior as psychical forces of Eros and Thanatos. In the intervening years, the study of dreams would point to knowledge, if only knowledge of the individual’s past. By presenting dreams as fulfilled wishes, dreams foretell the future, he states, the future of that dreamer, for dreams indicate the progression of our psyche.

This last conclusion, folded into Freud’s overall exploration of dreams, is probably the most startling of his entire work.

Retribution is an important ethical issue relevant to an ethos of eremitism. By definition, retribution is a paying back, a compensation, an eye for an eye, an equivalence of “insult.” But on a social and ethical spectrum, retribution is nothing less than the claimed right to equalize perceived imbalance, and is the basis of what is called “justice.” The nature of retribution is at odds with the depicted expressions of this spectrum:

revenge –> retribution –> justice

Revenge is negative compensation dominated by emotion. Revenge was the earliest behavior suppressed by the group, for the sake of the group and social order. Thus, in the scriptural Decalogue, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” forbade vengeance taken up by an individual or clan member in favor of decision-making by the authorities of the clan. The commandment did not forbid killing of enemies of the clan, of outsiders — only of members. The extraordinary power of the Roman paterfamilias was gradually transfer to political authorities. And when a clan member wronged another in Northern Europe until late in the Middle Ages, feuds and blood-killings were unchecked until stronger authority seized the mechanisms of power. Revenge as a right or prerogative was transferred from the individual and the family to the clan and, ultimately, to the state.

Whether conceived as social contract or coercion of the state, the transformation of revenge to retribution was a historical transition. Where authority compensated for crime, the motive was not vengeance because ostensibly authority is oblique and disinterested in the emotional aspects of the original act and the sorrows of the offended kin. The motive of the authority was to compensate or rectify a societal imbalance, an offense to order. A purely monetary compensation was the historical code. In Germanic law, weregild assigned a monetary value to the slain. A peasant or serf was worth little. A bishop was worth a great deal. The system reinforced order of a sort, based on the privilege of the victim.

Eventually authorities recognized that such a system was not a sufficient retribution or equalization in theory or practice, and embraced both a harsher retribution and a loftier motive. The harsher retribution was capital punishment. Capital punishment rather than weregild equalized the victim but more specifically equalized the perceived balance or retribution offered by the authority. Hence “an eye for an eye” was more clearly symmetrical and appealing from the point of view of the authorities if not to kin in the resolution of crime or passion.

The loftier motive was an inevitable mechanism in authority’s justifying its power to make blanket social decisions once reserved to individuals, families and clans. A concept of retribution was inadequate to an authority that had historically abused its power while simultaneously regulating power and abuse among its members. Power reserved to itself the old prerogatives, but retribution does not adequately cover the motives of power. These motives reduce to revenge and the reservation to authority to create disorder and chaos, abuse and punishment, within its own autonomous sphere. As this sphere grew, the weighty need for explication emerged among the intelligentsia. Hence the notion of justice emerged. Hence, too, the just war theory.

Justice is moral justification for power, or, rather, how the powerful explain the motive of their actions. These actions are the exercise of power — not the exercise of virtue, creativity, conviviality, or harmony.

Justice and justification thus become circular: power is just because it exists; power exists legitimately to the degree that it is just. The exercise of power is just because the existence of power is just. When authority intervenes in society (its own or another), its motive is considered impartial and balanced if it is just, but it takes upon itself power to coerce and punish deviations of order when it perceives threats to power. Threats to power are not necessarily threats to individuals or groups — they are foremost threats to the powerful. An entire apparatus of force is created as the enforcers of justice. Justice not being indifferent to perceived, potential or theoretical threats to itself, justice (or power in the guise of justice) preempts situations, actions, even thoughts. The preemption is punishment, either vicarious or to reassert order. The evolution of justice theory from the raw emotion of revenge is not entirely progress. The mask of power obscures the face of justice’s reasoning or the relativity of justice in a world dominated by power.

Authority and power will not likely budge from a posture entangled in a rationalization of revenge and retribution on a state level. The individual who seeks a zone of right conduct must transcend the pinnacle of rationalism in justice and move on to a different plane. To imitate the justice of authorities and powers is to give them credence, to sacrifice one’s integrity to them, blind to the reality that the motive of power is not justice as conventionally pictured: fairness, tolerance, order. Justice is tempered anger, wrath held back, the gloved fist. Justice is privilege, power, immunity from morality.

The ethical spectrum must be extended:

revenge –> retribution –> justice –> mercy

Mercy is a virtue considered optional to the rationalist and the realist. Indeed, mercy ignores justice and the need for punishment, power, and the execution of law. Mercy actively undermines power, and in the eyes of power becomes an enemy, introducing chaos into the order maintained by power. Further, mercy is haphazard and individual. It has no philosophy, no legal or political theory. Granted, mercy is invoked by the powerful as a way of tempering its harsh face, as a diversion and deception. With craft, the deigning of mercy on an impotent enemy or criminal gives a humane appearance to power. But only the individual can give mercy. Mercy is not a tactic.

Mercy is a forgetting. The popular phrase “forgive and forget” takes into account two trajectories of mercy. To forgive is to place an insult into context, to perceive an insult as the weakness and foible of the offender, who is subject to many forces and dependent. In this sense, forgiveness can be haughty or be more like its counterpart forgetting. For to forget is to make oblivious, to not hold anything for retribution, to give up to fate or God or karma that insult taken but not held. Mercy takes the position of a recipient of insult having nothing which can by injured, nowhere that the insult can “stick.” The insult is forgotten because the act is deliberately forgotten, is not remembered. Thus mercy transcends both the emotion of revenge, the calculation of retribution, and the obtuse rationalism of justice.

But to make mercy no longer dependent on individual insults, to make mercy a form of right behavior that does not depend on insult — for many things in life can provoke anger and resentment within the mind, heart and soul — the individual must reach a state of compassion. Hence the spectrum:

revenge –> retribution –> justice –> mercy –> compassion

Compassion is a state of mind rather than a response to insult. Compassion is the active engagement of events and situations that require addressing and rectifying, rather than a response to personal insult or injury. But an event or situation provoking mercy is not an occurrence in the eyes of compassion but, rather, the very condition of solitude and suffering that is universal. This universality is where compassion enters and identifies. The important characteristic of compassion is that it bypasses institutions, authorities, and powers, and enters directly into the psychological and spiritual condition of all. There is no crime, offense, or insult for which to compensate. Compassion knows that each individual is to every degree a bundle of causes and circumstances, and that their inner self is nothing but a churning sea of suffering and solitude. Bypassing the rationalism of power and justice, and not awaiting an injury for which to show mercy, compassion enters the subjective and discovers the true nature of the human situation.

The mindset of compassion is relevant to eremitism because it frees the self from worldly encumbrances, be they emotional, material, or social. The goal of the hermit is not simply to understand solitude but to enter it unflinchingly, leaving nothing behind that calls for compensation.

In A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland points out the difference between ancient and modern eremitism, that is, the eremitism of the ancient desert hermits (but analogies to medieval Western and to Asian hermit traditions apply) contrasted to the English Romantics such as Wordsworth. In part, this difference is the result of time and culture, but an important psychological factor affects consideration of both.

Maitland went on retreat to the Sinai in the footsteps of the Christian desert hermits and trekked Galloway in northwestern Scotland in a wilderness that has not changed significantly over the centuries. Emblematically, she took one book on each trip: Helen Waddell’s Sayings of the Desert Fathers on the first trip and Wordsworth’s Preludes on the second.

The ancient hermits sought self-effacement, the reduction of the ego or self to the point where emotions and psychological turmoil evaporated and nothing was left but God (or Emptiness, or other equivalent in the East). The English Romantics, on the other hand, sought settings such as Nature in order to build up the self, plunge into self-realization, and thereby develop the insight, imagination, and fortitude to deal with the world and gradually give it up. The Romantics saw the need to develop a self in order to get rid of the self. According to the Romantics, the inputs of society and culture frustrate development of an independent self, a self realized.

Romanticism was a revolt against rationalism’s reduction of the human being to reason alone. At the same time, rationalist philosophy bolstered the power interests of the era in the land enclosures that plunged small farms and villages into poverty and with the transformation of rural areas into accessible mines, logging grounds, agricultural fields and estates for the wealthy through industrialism.

Maitland outlines the philosophical attitudes of the Romantics:

• elevation of emotion over reason and of the senses over the intellect;
• Introspection and a fascination with the self; a sort of heightened awareness of one’s own moods and thoughts;
• fascination with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional personality, and particularly his inner struggles;
• construction of the artist as a free creative spirit — whose expression of authentic personal emotion was more important than form;
• emphasis upon imagination and spontaneity as a way to spiritual truth;
• idea that children were born naturally free and even perfect — and that social life and its demands corrupted them. They came into the world “trailing clouds of glory” and “shades of the prison house” ensnared them all too fast;
• heightened appreciation of he beauties of nature, particularly the sublime.

This useful distillation points to the Romantic project of finding the whole self, beyond only the reasoning intellectual self or the emotional self common to everyone in society — base, reactive, instinctual.

Romanticism extols the genius and hero as an assertion of self and triumph over the dominant social values. This genius and hero is not a political or military figure or a captain of industry or political office, of course. The poet, artist, wanderer, adventurer, seer — these are the heroes of Romanticism. In this vein, the ancient Celtic heroes of Britain are the hermits, and evidence of the ancient past such as Tinturn Abbey need not be literally ascribed to hermits as long as it was a provocation to the imagination. A natural setting, wild and untouched, is the ideal setting for imagination and reverie.

The reference to childhood hearkens to Rousseau and Blake. Childhood is the only opportunity to present vivifying images and experiences to the mind and spirit prior to the intermediary social and cultural corruption. Inevitably, the recreation of childhood experience escapes the adult Romantic. Today, alternative education can present methods of tapping sensitive channels in the child through music and the presentation of world literature: fairy tales, fables, and stories. Such literature is quite relevant to developing the adult sensitivity as well, for it distills the human experience and delineates universal values.

Children also profit greatly from being outdoors, in nature, for the psychology of the self ought to include not merely the imprint of other people but the impression of animals, fields, forests, seas — whatever can become private to the onlooker and a source of imagination. Ultimately, the influence of “field trips” and exposure to nature cannot be quantified, and the process is difficult to understand because it is not rational, only partly cognitive, and not merely aesthetic. So, too, in adults.

The Romantic agenda is both a revolt and an affirmation. The hermit easily fits the portrait of revolt, even when only a withdrawal from society, and similarly fulfills the expectation of an affirmation. The Romantic effort to build a self in order to withdraw from society becomes a single process, like that of the solitary pursuing an eremitic life. But like every historical movement, Romanticism fell against the shoals of violent 19th-century social and technological changes. Worsened conditions of daily life for the majority of people hardened the spirit of revolt without the prospect of affirmation. How could the sensitive observer give up a self when so many inimical social and cultural forces wanted to wrest it away?

Historical romanticism no longer resonates for those for whom Nature is an abstraction and the imagination a byproduct of ego and popular media. Maitland’s juxtaposition points us to both the next step of Romantic eremitism and of “ancient” eremitism. For the West the next step is an intensification of solitude and silence, justified by a somewhat intellectual analysis. Otherwise such a step can devolve into the recluse’s psychological dysfunctionality. Ancient eremitism, including Western medieval and Eastern forms, offers two trajectories: 1) a strong intellectual or philosophical critique of the modern world as a justification for non-participation, and 2) a strong meditative philosophy of withdrawal, whether in the world or out of it, based on spiritual, psychological, artistic, or cultural values. The latter can be further helped by an intellectual understanding of society and culture; the former can be helped by an intimation (to use Wordsworth’s favorite term) of what is wrong with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the world.

However we approach eremitism, retracing the experience of Romanticism helps clarify the role of the self in the many settings one is heir to.