Being a Hermit with You

Because it is impossible to go about one's life without having some sort of community connection, no one can truly live their life in solitude. For example, Lily Martindale's family and friends were knocking at her door and ultimately looking after her well-being. And as Sue Halper explains in "The Place of Solitaries", "[w]hen Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live for two years, it was a young man's experiment". Even though Ned and Mae are proclaimed hermits, and their lifestyle "was no more an experiment than tilling the soil is an experiment for a farmer" (120), the fact that they live together in the same house makes the sincerity of their hermitage questionable. Yet, I think that if a person is a hermit in their mind and has made an effort to live off the grid with as little interaction with outsiders as possible, then they are indeed a hermit.

None of the Adirondack hermits we have read about are absolutely separated from society, but what makes them hermits is the fact that they have built their own society that can sustain itself with little reliance on external resources. Halper describes the micro-community of hermits beautifully when she says "[Ned and Mae] have the society of each other, and they have poems, and they have fresh apples, and no one to tell them they can't" (120). It makes sense that if there are less people and institutions involved in running a system, then there won't be as much differing opinions and backlash that hinder a system's liberties. Perhaps hermitage would be better defined by its community byproduct rather than its lack of interacting with the community.

The hermit community is one that survives through stories left behind, and those who aspire to get a taste of hermit customs examine the way ones have lived (mostly through secondary sources, since the nature of most hermit is to limit their accessibility). In "Solo", Sue took a copy of Walden with her on her solo canoeing expedition, treating Thoreau's experience as a model. Even though she was careful to not "bend the rules" (121)-- rules unwritten that had no urgent consequences-- taking Thoreau's book with her was a way of connecting with another human being the entire extent of her trip. As memories of her grandfather flooded her mind, and other people on the lake interrupted her peace, Sue realized the innate futility of her goal to get away from others and have the solitary experience she envisioned. Both Sue and other Adirondack hermits we read about were largely unaware that total absence was impossible, since there was never such a thing. The hermits of the Adirondacks are always known, always someone's child, and even though someone like Noah John Rondeau may never meet Ned and Mae or Lily Martindale (hypothetically, if they were not fictional characters), their contribution to the Adirondack hermit culture -- a sub-culture that cannot be denied even if it is not shared by many -- makes them members of a community. Whether a hermit lives physically alone or with another, in theory, they are always being a hermit with someone else, even if that person is a nineteenth century romantic or living contemporaneously halfway around the world.