The Hermitage
A story of a hermit in his hermitage
What is a hermitage? In general, it is simply a place of religious seclusion. But one may be in a hermitage for reasons that have little or nothing to do with religion — it’s the seclusion part that is operative.
In history there have been some rather well-known hermits. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, since the word “hermit” conjures up a person — usually a man — who cuts himself off from others; and then how comes it that he is well known? But many of the religious and spiritual leaders of history were hermits at some time: Gautama Buddha; Mohandas Gandhi; St. Augustine, and many, many others who were part of the monastic movement or experimented with asceticism.
This is a short story of a hermit we’ll call Sinhue (pronounced sin-oo-way), and his hermitage. Sinhue was an educated and cultured person, who loved to study books, pen his own compositions, and various other forms of artistic expression. To survive he was a scribe for important people, and from this he made his living.
Sinhue’s hermitage was larger than most such places. It was a two-story house, in which he lived alone with his domestic animals. It had not always been a hermitage, and he’d not always been a hermit. This hermitage was not far away from other men, out in a desert somewhere. It was smack in the…
