"We must remember that Robinson Crusoe was one of the great myths of the middle class, commercial civilization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the myth not of eremitical solitude but of pragmatic individualism. Crusoe is a symbolical figure in an era when every man's house was his castle in the trees, but only because every man was a very prudent and resourceful citizen who knew how to make the best out of the least and could drive a hard bargain with any competitor, even life itself. Carefree Crusoe was happy because he had an answer to everything. The real hermit is not so sure he has an answer."
Photo by Thomas Merton
-- Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) pp. 201-201
Saturday, March 24, 2012
real hermits don't have answers (solitude)
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Pentecost
Kelly Latimore Icon "You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as aw...
If "the real hermit is not so sure he has an answer", I must be in the correct line.
ReplyDeleteme too, Robert. I've given up on answers altogether.
ReplyDeleteLife is not about finding answers, but living out our questions. In the words of the poet, Rainier Maria Rilke:
ReplyDelete"…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Perhaps. And if now, what does it matter?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the Rilke quote, Matt.