The Hermit Through History: Easy to Track but Harder to Understand

Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses

By Isabel Colegate

Counterpoint: 284 pp., $25

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"A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow upon the Hous[e] Top," wrote Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century English vicar, "and like a Pelican in the Wilderness."

What men and women seek in the solitary life of a spiritual hermit, however, is not happiness in the ordinary sense. "[T]he flight to the desert seems to have been rather a flight of the mind to God," explains Isabel Colegate in "A Pelican in the Wilderness," a bright and highly literate study of asceticism in both the East and West. Nor do the rigors of life in a cave or on a hilltop always reward the hermit with ecstasy or enlightenment. "Despondency," she observes, "is the big beast that stalks the solitary."

Colegate, best known as a novelist ("Agatha," "The Shooting Party" and "Winter Journey," among others), places herself squarely within the rich literary traditions of English travel writing while, at the same time, plumbing the spiritual depths of the hermit's life. She moves deftly through several thousand years of history, always keeping an eye on the curious role of the recluse. But she concedes from the start that the idea of the hermit's life is one that few of us will ever fully understand, much less act on.

"The holy hermit has been there since time immemorial, somewhere up in the misty Chungsan hills of China, or wrapped in yak-skins in a cave among the Himalayan snows, or wandering through the crowds by the Ganges at Benares, or quiet in his hut in the deepest Russian forests," writes Colegate.

"[T]he idea so beautifully expressed by Bellini or Durer or any other of the many painters who have depicted St Francis in the wilderness or St Jerome in his cave

"A Pelican in the Wilderness" has less to say about the daunting and often dreary reality of the hermit's life than the way the very idea of the hermit has impressed itself on the Western imagination, including her own. Thus, along with famous hermits ranging from the Desert Fathers to Thomas Merton, she invokes Kipling and Keats, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even J.D. Salinger, who inspires her to muse on "the modern phenomenon of [the] celebrity hermit."