The Book of Hermits

<p>Hermits have thrived in every major historical era geography culture and society - from antiquity to the present East and West in deserts forests </p><p>and mountains depicted in art literature and lore.</p><p>What are their motives? </p><p>Religious spiritual philosophical? Ethical aesthetic psychological? From a love of wilderness to a desire for the anonymity of life as a hermit in the city. From an inkling about the universe to a desire for radical simplicity. The historical hermits have reflected all of these. </p><p>As Kahlil Gibran put it A hermit renounces the world of fragments to enjoy the world wholly without interruption. Hermits want as Thoreau proposed of himself to live deliberately. </p><p>Within these pages all these motives are explored all the hermits considered: poets sages teachers philosophers the eccentric pious irreverent sociable reclusive and wise - men and women. Hermits from India China Japan and South Asia huts cells and cabins from the Middle East to Europe to the United States. The waning of hermits shifted the modern Western world to solitude. But the persistence of hermits even today is universal.</p><p><br></p>