The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

classes and were highly educated. Hermit protesters were so esteemed in China that a few times, tradition
holds, when a non-corrupt emperor was seeking a successor, he passed over members of his own family and
selected a solitary. Most turned down the offer, having found peace in reclusion.
The first great literary work about solitude, the Tao Te Ching, was written in ancient China, likely in the
sixth century B.C., by a protester hermit named Lao-tzu. The book’s eighty-one short verses describe the
pleasures of forsaking society and living in harmony with the seasons. The Tao Te Ching says that it is only
through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom. “Those with
less become content,” says the Tao, “those with more become confused.” The poems, still widely read, have
been hailed as a hermit manifesto for more than two thousand years.
Around a million protester hermits are living in Japan right now. They’re called hikikomori—“pulling
inward”—and the majority are males, aged late teens and up, who have rejected Japan’s competitive,
conformist, pressure-cooker culture. They have retreated into their childhood bedrooms and almost never
emerge, in many cases for more than a decade. They pass the day reading or surfing the web. Their parents
deliver meals to their doors, and psychologists offer them counseling online. The media has called them “the
lost generation” and “the missing million.”
Pilgrims—religious hermits—are by far the largest group. The connection between seclusion and
spiritual awakening is profound. Jesus of Nazareth, after his baptism in the River Jordan, withdrew to the
wilderness and lived alone for forty days, then began attracting his apostles. Siddhārtha Gautama, in about
450 B.C., according to one version of the story, sat beneath a pipal tree in India, meditated for forty-nine
days, and became Buddha. Tradition holds that the prophet Muhammad, in A.D. 610, was on a retreat in a
cave near Mecca when an angel revealed to him the first of many verses that would become the Koran.
In Hindu philosophy, everyone ideally matures into a hermit. Becoming a sadhu, renouncing all familial
and material attachments and turning to ritual worship, is the fourth and final stage of life. Some sadhus file
their own death certificates, as their lives are considered terminated and they are legally dead to the nation of
India. There are at least four million sadhus in India today.
During the Middle Ages, after the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt died out, a new form of
Christian solitary emerged, this time in Europe. They were called anchorites—the name is derived from an
ancient Greek word for “withdrawal”—and they lived alone in tiny dark cells, usually attached to the outer
wall of a church. The ceremony initiating a new anchorite often included the last rites, and the cell’s doorway
was sometimes bricked over. Anchorites were expected to remain in their cells for the rest of their lives; in
some cases, they did so for over forty years. This existence, they believed, would offer an intimate
connection with God, and salvation. Servants delivered food and emptied chamber pots through a small
opening.
Virtually every large town across France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and Greece had an anchorite.
In many areas, there were more females than males. A woman’s life in the Middle Ages was severely
bound, and to become an anchorite, unburdened by social strictures or domestic toil, may have felt
paradoxically emancipating. Scholars have called anchorites the progenitors of modern feminism.
Pursuers are the most modern type of hermits. Rather than fleeing society, like protesters, or living
beholden to higher powers, like pilgrims, pursuers seek alone time for artistic freedom, scientific insight, or
deeper self-understanding. Thoreau went to Walden to journey within, to explore “the private sea, the
Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being.”
An endless list of writers and painters and philosophers and scientists have been described as hermits,