Hermits in unlikely places

 I’ve changed the way I think about hermits. Bill Porter, who was mentioned in yesterday’s note, showed me another point of view.

“Urban hermit” sounded like an oxymoron to me. A hermit with a wife, an electrical bill or a car seemed to be a contradiction.

Thoreau’s biographers often wade into this thicket. For all his eloquence about solitude, Thoreau had an active social life while living at Walden Pond.

But he also had solitude, for at least part of the day. And he valued it, just as today’s Buddhist and Taoist hermits value it, even those who live in cities.

Porter says that the idea of solitude is connected with the idea of teaching. The presumption is that if a person is going to teach, he or she will not simply study what everyone has said about the subject. The teacher will first spend time alone, practicing. The master’s teaching does not come from a book. It comes from that regular practice — from something done alone, by oneself.

The idea is similar to that of intermittent fasting. Some people might squeeze all their meals into eight hours, giving their digestive systems 16 hours of rest. Similarly, the idea of eliminating noise — telephones, meetings and the Internet — for several hours a day, just to give one’s psyche a rest, makes sense to me. 

• Note: I’ve mentioned Bill Porter in a couple of notes. Tomorrow, a note specifically about him.