Hermitage of the self
“In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”
Sarah Ore Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
This quote from Jewett appears in her account of spending a summer in a Maine village by the ocean in the mid-1800s. She describes the people who live there in loving fashion, including a number who reside off the coast on remote islands, often by themselves or with only their family. One woman exiled herself to one of these islands and spent forty years living there, occasionally accepting visitors but eschewing any invitations to return to the home community.
What struck me about this quote is several points. One, is the power that a place — and time — can have in defining who we are and where we choose to go. How often in your dreams do you return to a childhood home or place? That place captures a world for you and perhaps a moment in time when you realized yourself as a self. I often return in dream and memory to my childhood home out at the end of Long Island where every summer I ran wild through the dune grass, walked to visit my Grandmother to play cards and drink tea, and witnessed the Milky Way in the night sky, reflecting how small I was and looking into the ancient past times of the stars. This left me vertiginous with the very thought of the small circle of those I loved passionately in the vast expanses of the universe. We are everything; we are nothing. I found safety in creating a kingdom in the deserted dunes where the earth was still primary and full of spirits. There were darker memories as well but I was lucky in that what endured were those bright moments of intense being.
A number of years ago I wrote a paper about the secret places of childhood based on a survey done among some of my fellow academics about a place they recalled. So many respondents shared their memory of a moment or event, usually insignificant, but which stayed with them and happiness.
But perhaps it is not from childhood but a later event that sets the course of your life and becomes a secret place of comfort, challenge, or endless regret. I see myself sitting at a desk in my office, rain pounding outside, and realizing that I was not at the funeral of a professor I had known from my early days at college — a professor who had a profound effect on me as a seventeen year old. I sat there unwilling to brave the rain, or consciously creating lame excuses instead of offering honor to that past me and his kindness, and his intense loneliness. A moment of failure — which returns again as a trope to remind me of what I could have done and been.
The second point I would like to make regarding this quote is Jewett’s acknowledgement of the ways in which each of us is a hermit at heart. The poet Ranier Maria Rilke describes marriage as “a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.” While he is describing the best form of partnership as he sees it (worth its own examination, for sure), what strikes me most is the echo of Jewett’s comment about our nature as hermits, as solitary beings whose self can never be fully open to another. Each of us is a mystery, even to ourselves, but always to others. Some of us drift through life and never stop to reflect on who we were, are, becoming. Others spend far too much time observing themselves and miss the shared pathos of living among others who likewise are centers of their own universe.
The next time you are on the subway, walking through a public place, or simply driving along a road: look at those around you and marvel that here we are, at the same time and place in the universe, living and breathing for the split second we live. We are oblivious to one another and yet, we are here together. Really look at them and honor the astonishing mystery of being a self.
