The Present Need of Hermits

...It is wisdom reduced to everyday human terms...

...To reach a hermit some way, somehow, was always the hope of dying knight or hunted king...

...Instead of sports clothes, even of khaki, he must wear skins...

...And very soon he must grow wise in the healing things of the woods and fields, and transplant them close to his spring and tree, so that he will have ready at hand the balm that soothes, the camomile that cools, the bone-set that braces and revives, the taragon that seasons...

...Look again into your old history books or your book of ballads or your Waverley novels, and see if kings and queens, knights and their ladies, plain warriors and their wives and sweethearts, did not steal away, in crises to ask advice of "the hermit good who lives in the wood...

...The Dragon of the great Pendragonship might to this day be on the stationery of the Houses of Parliament 1 A hermit lives far enough out of things to get a good perspective on the relations of men to their affairs...

...He prevented evil in the mass by working on the individual, and making an honest man of him...

...Locusts and wild honey he must find, cress and nuts he must gather in thankfulness...

...He is one, or he cannot be one...

...He cuts that out, and he goes a long distance away from the world in order to get a clear view of things...

...he would have seen to it that Guinevere bore a fine young family to King Arthur, instead of playing with Lancelot's fire...

...in the death of winter, when "the ivy-tod is heavy with snow...

...They recognize the pure-hearted, wise folk of God...

...Thoughts so whimsical as these may perhaps seem like an intrusion into the new and highly efficient field of social service...

...No thermos-bottles...

...Always in the very old stories-which are made of the stuff of life itself-the hermit was the refuge...

...The hermit must satisfy himself with what the wild offers...

...And he always answered the call...

...He would have given young Vivian some lessons in common sense that languid spring day...

...The hermits were pioneers in social service work...

...So he sees the world more squarely...

...he is civilizing the wild, taming the wilderness, defeating his own end...

...If he wants more, his logic will not hold...

...This garden, too, he will gather in from the wild gardens of the woods, and persuade into further loveliness...

...And for protection against the chill of winter and the summer storms, he must content himself-nay rejoice himself-with the stout bark of oak and birch and maple, with poles of the pine, and a roof of cunningly wrought thatch, all making a fragrant and comfortable shelter sufficient for him and for any and all guests...

...in faint, rose-grey dawns, liquid with bird notes...

...We are deprived of all sanctuary...

...Then again, he has certain times of revelation in his solitude-at night, under vast, deep stretches of stars...

...He's had a jar too...

...And here is clearly shown the difference between a fakir and a true hermit...

...It certainly has a bearing upon the modern mood...

...Their purpose is rather a desire further to enrich that field by adding to it the garnered wisdom of the ages...

...Or would you (a thousand to one you would) speed even a little more quickly past him murmuring to yourself, "Poor fool...

...her sweet yet cruel compassion...

...her unrelenting logic...

...So he learns how to readjust, to interpret, to simplify...

...THE PRESENT NEED OF HERMITS By FRANCES N. S. ALLEN IF YOU should meet a hermit in the wild-wood when you are driven there by doubt or anguish or perplexity, would you consult him ? If you should be speeding rather recklessly along a detour, urged to desperation by some lashing of modern life, and there, under a spreading oak by a purling brook, you should behold a bona fide hermit gathering simples, or at his devotions, or fishing perhaps, would you slam on your brakes instanter and leap from your car...

...One lion, forever grateful to a hermit for taking a thorn from his paw, became a faithful member of a nearby convent, drawing the water from the River Jordan for the needs of the brethren, and living upon milk and herbs instead of the prey of his unconverted years...

...On the above question and its answer there really hangs something more worthy of our consideration than of our scorn...

...There can be no compact with the outdoors which shall read: "If you give me back a sound constitution, or a restored faith in humanity, or a well-mended heart, I will give you my undivided time, night and day, and my most respectful attention : and I will write a book about you, and translate you over the radio to the masses...

...Today we have no refuges whatever from life...

...If we would but turn back the pages of our history books, we should find proof of their entire reliability, of their having been, indeed, just as well established and generally accepted a part of the social scheme in very critical periods of human history as our state departments, with all their bulletins of advice, or our suddenly made up committees of investigation to prevent evils already accomplished and scattered abroad for imitation...

...It is, to be sure, a direct means to another end -the dispensing of common sense...

...However, this hospitality, satisfying and illuminating as it is, is by no means the only business of the hermit...

...and he might even have so counseled King Arthur that his dynasty would have left no room in Britain for Plantagenet or Tudor or Stuart or even Hanoverian...

...Ask Lancelot and Arthur, ask Guinevere and Iseult, ask Ivanhoe and Rebecca, ask Richard Coeur de Lion, or even the Black Prince, whether or not they believed in the efficacy of hermits as an established social institution...

...Then in his solitude nature draws near him fearlessly, and he learns to know her as she is-her stern justice...

...We do not even know-nor care to know, except as a picturesque reminiscence--that hermits were experts and specialists...

...At such times as these, what is there between the hermit and reality...

...Scientists -not to speak of poets-would heartily recommend frequent visits to retreats just so primitive, just so meagre in their creature comforts...

...A little hunger in a wilderness is better than many a full meal...

...It is worthwhile for the modern expert, out from his university training, with a degree or two in his pocket and a promising salary piling up in the bank, to look back across the ages and see how Cuthbert on bleak Lindisfarne shaped the destinies of Britain, how Anthony in the desert planted seed still blooming in our civilization today...

...In his uplifted hands, he gathers the stars, the dawn, the lightning and the hailstones, the snow and the hoar frost and reads their meaning...

...The chief thing in the make-up of a hermit is that he shall not make himself...

...No sterno...

...However, of far more value than any merely human documents as testimonials to the usefulness of hermits is the attitude toward them of the creatures of the wild...

...Lancelot, after the tourney of the Jewels, lay wounded in the hermit's cell, and there piteous Elaine found him and tended him, and the hermit understood...

...And wisdom comes direct from God...

...Furred and feathered creatures cannot be deceived...

...There he must set up in the business of being a hermit...

...What credentials other than these are needed to prove the reliability of hermits...

...Would you at once recognize him, just as you would recognize the vermilion flash of a gasoline station, as a means of refilling your mind with motive power, of putting into order your damaged running gear...

...They are not so intended...

...In the old border ballads, in Robin Hood, in the Mabinogion, in the contes and fables and the Romans-in all the honest old human annals-the gravest and largest as well as the smallest and most pitiable, questions of living, called the hermit from his simple garden, or from feeding his thrushes or praying on his old oak stump...

...Any hermit will tell you that this explanation of his motives-if they can be called motives-is quite correct...

...He takes the sun for his only timepiece...

...I'm bound for that-or worse-if this pressure keeps up...

...Meals of wild duck eggs and cress and nuts and honey commend themselves to the most critical dieticians...

...and a pure stream, a mossy stump, a tree on which to bind his device and under which to find shelter, must determine his abode...

...Truly, after such a banquet, the guests, refreshed with its fulness, might better understand Dante's cry: "And I saw this world in such guise that I smiled at its cheapness...

...In fact, the hermit was superior to the committee or the department as a social reformer or adjuster...

...Suppose Merlin, for instance, had been a true hermit instead of a fakir who lived in the greenwood-and who got entangled in the affairs he was expected to untangle...

...The hermit keeps the way between himself and God as clear as is in his power, in order that he may get at wisdom and dispense it, in the form of common sense, to perplexed and unhappy mortals...

...Ask any you may meet in your hiking, as he binds up the wounds of a bleeding knight or meditates "On the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak stump...

...The desert Fathers had for respectful friends and docile servants even hyenas, hippopotami, crocodiles and especially lions...

...Indeed, it is in this matter of hospitality, with its opportunity for succor and refreshment, that the world should seriously consider the hermit today...

...He must go to the wilderness without any grievance against the world, without any bargaining with nature...

...As yet, perhaps, to most of us, locusts are a taste to be acquired, although centuries ago the Chinese, whose wisdom we are now realizing, were relishing grasshoppers...

...in rocking, blanching tempests...

...This he gives to you...

...her sure, unhurried punctuality...

...In fact there is no self about him at all...

...Common sense is the more popular name for wisdom...

...We consult doctors, psychoanalysts, healers, mediums, nature-fakirs, gymnasts, beauty specialists, dieticians-anything, everything but never a hermit...

...He goes to the solitudes not to "find himself" but to find something higher than himself, and so, inevitably, discover his real self, not the self he had hitherto fancied himself...

...The next sign is that they have nothing, that they take nothing with them to the wild...

...Her standard of living becomes his standard...

...But his is a mild form of madness...

...We make a shrill cry about experts, specialists...

...But then it is precisely the acquiring of a taste for things distasteful to our overfed palates that we most need...

...There is no hysteria about the real hermit, no urge from his own disappointments...

...We live in the heat and tangle of emergencies, perplexities, problems, temptations-although we do not so entitle them-anxieties, crises, that bend our spirits to the snapping, rub them to the very burning...

...But, in the first place, the hermit must be genuine, not a nature-fakir or a neurasthenic or a moral coward...

...And then there were the wild boars and does and stags and buffaloes, and even the little hares-not to mention the birds, from wren to eagle-that loved the hermits of European wilds, and were their associates and helpers...

...As well, he must have something of a garden of sweet and beauty, to furnish garlands for his shrine, and for solace to certain travelers whose deadly ills are not bodily...

...And who could be overcareful of his preferences at the sylvan meal in the midst of converse so simple and so delightsome, upon subjects not other-worldly, but unworldly and without bitterness, while the glowworms replaced electric bulbs, and mussel shells and leaves and bark were the only dishes to be removed...