A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland
In the course of researching and writing the book Maitland spent silent time in silent places – on Skye in the Hebrides; in the Sinai Desert; in forests and mountains; in a flotation tank; in monasteries and libraries. She was trying to match her personal experiences to those of other people – from fairy stories to single-handed sailors, from hermits and romantic poets to prisoners and castaways, from reading and writing to mountaineering and polar exploration, from mythology to psychoanalysis.
For Sara Maitland, a practising Roman Catholic, silence has a profound religious dimension, which is also examined and discussed. This journey into silence has held surprises and setbacks, but mainly a deepening sense of happiness. In the end Maitland built a little house on an isolated moor in Galloway, designed for solitary and silent living.
The Hermit Writings of S. are a collection of short essays on many aspects of being a hermit – self-sufficiency, hermit and the world, love, time, urban eremitism, and virtue, for example. They are straight-forward, down to earth and direct. The writings are posted on the Hermitary website by Meng-hu. They are presented here with no changes to present them to more people and in a pdf format that may be more convenient to readers. The essays offer sound advice to novice hermits not only about the practicalities of the life (such as suggestions of where and how to live) but more importantly about some of the issues that are bound to come up as soon as the distractions of the world fall away.
The writings of S. are among the most important contemporary accounts of eremitism, to be kept alongside Thomas Merton for example. What makes his essays so valuable is that he is clearly writing from experience. He has walked to talk; he neither encourages nor discourages yet simply accepts that those who must live as hermits will do so and at the same time points out some of the traps and digressions likely to be encountered along the journey of solitude.
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries & Recluses by Isabel Colegate
Isobel Colegate brings a novelists insight to the lives of hermits through the ages – men and women, Buddhist, Christian and others who have found the journey either liberating or hell. She tells their stories with a genuine interest and warmth that is neither overly enthusiastic (knowing how many have been brutalized by the experience) nor uncomprehendingly critical.
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses
Hermits, The Insights of Solitude by Peter France
France's book is a survey of the wide variety of people who have lived as hermits, mostly in the Christian tradition, but including such modern hermits as the late Robert Lax who lived on Patmos. The rich tapestry of lives is a good introduction to how other people in other times have answered the call to intense solitude. The biography is a really useful place to start to delve deeper.
Hermits; The Insights of Solitude
A Hermit in the Himalayas by Paul Brunton
Paul Brunton was born in London in 1898 and died in Swizerland as recently as 1981. This book is part travelogue through what is still a fairly remore region of the world and part spiritual experience. The book was originally published in 1938, at a time when few outsiders ventured as far as Mount Kailas.
Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter
I remember my elation the first time I read this book and my amazement that there could still be hermits living in mountainous areas of China even after the Cultural Revolution when so much of the country's spiritual heritage was destroyed. Bill Porter's book is all the more powerful and convincing because he approached the hermits with humility and respect and does not treat them as curiosities from an alien world. A fascinating and thoroughly worthwhile adventure for anyone interest in this subject.
