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The Lifetime Channel recently aired a made-for-TV movie entitled Georgia O’Keeffe starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons. In spite of excellent acting, the movie was a big disappointment to me* [see footnote], focusing primarily on O’Keeffe’s turbulent love affair with New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz (played by Irons), her ultimate marriage to him and her [...]
Actor Tom Hanks created a truly Memorable Hermit in the 2000 motion picture Cast Away. Hanks’ character, Fed-Ex manager Chuck Noland, is the only survivor of a plane crash and is forced to survive alone on a desert island for four years. His transition from a portly, time-obsessed urbanite to a tan, bearded, slightly-emaciated athlete is [...]
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I always have great empathy for natural reclusives who find themselves stranded outside their comfort zone and Larry McMurty’s Sin Killer (2002) is a perfect example. Trapper/Indian-fighter Jim Snow (nicknamed Sin Killer) relinquishes his solitude in the first of Larry McMurtry’s tetrology, the Berrybender Narratives; but Jim would have (and probably should have) kept to himself had his youthful lust and [...]
A colleague of nobel laureate Linus Pauling, Dr. David R. Hawkins became a spiritual teacher by way of a couple of near-death experiences; a very successful New York psychiatric practice; a temporary retreat into atheism; and at one point seven years in seclusion – not a bad combination for acquiring some pretty advanced spiritual wisdom. The [...]
I will generally shy away from the consecrated Catholic hermits in this blog. My exposure to and understanding of Catholicism is so limited that it hardly seems fair to mention even one. But Catholic mystic Thomas Merton [1915-1968] wrote so eloquently about silence and solitude that he belongs on my list.
Merton’s poems, essays and autobiography have a unique [...]
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During one of his long programming phases, Griz routinely followed daytime reruns of the Gunsmoke TV series as background noise. I didn’t actually sit down and watch many episodes and there are a lot of episodes (635). The original series ran for 20 years before cancellation in 1975. Broadcast at one episode per day in reruns, that’s [...]
In the 1999 movie Instinct, Anthony Hopkins plays a renowned anthropologist, Dr. Ethan Powell, who “goes ape,” vanishing for more than a year to live alone with a band of mountain gorillas. This may not qualify him as a hermit in the truest sense, but that’s the advantage of a personal blog – if I think he’s [...]
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Han-Shan was a curmudgeonly Zen mystic/philosopher born in the early 700’s, and is one of China’s most revered poets. His name translates to “Cold Mountain.” Han-Shan lived in a cave at the base of Hanyen, (Cold Cliff), in Chekiang Province and wrote his poetry on stone slabs and tree trunks. Three hundred of the poems survived and are [...]
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Another of Hiaassen’s recurring fictional hermits is Mick Stranahan, a retired (as in “asked-to-leave”) investigator for the Florida Attorney General. A serial husband (six ex-wives) and loner, he lives in a stilt house on Florida’s Biscayne Bay and when that is destroyed by a hurricane, he becomes caretaker of a nearby, isolated island. Stranahan’s investigative skills come in [...]
