Robert Rodriguez: The Book of Hermits

Date

September 27, 2021

source

Robert Rodriguez’ “The Book of Hermits” is a work of impressive scholarship, covering the global history and lore of eremitism from antiquity to the present. Read an interview with the author here.If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, . . .

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The Hermitary

I have known the work of Robert Rodriguez for many years. Long before Daily Philosophy existed, there was already hermitary.com, Robert’s site that celebrated hermit lifestyle and hermit lore.

It was founded in 2002, almost twenty years ago now, and has always been the one resource to which I returned again and again when I was looking up a fact about anything that had to do with hermit life — or simply for inspiration. The Hermitary offered, and still offers, a wealth of articles on individual hermits, on the history of eremitic movements and religions, and on art, books and movies about hermits.

So I was thrilled to hear that Robert Rodriguez had finally put all his knowledge and his research of many decades into a book about hermits, called, fittingly, “The Book of Hermits” (374 pages; available from October 1, 2021 at Amazon and other booksellers, both as print and ebook).

Hermits and Happiness

Hermits, from the Greek “eremites,” (=men of the desert), are found in all cultures and at all times. In this article, we look at the phenomenon of hermit life as a whole, before we go into more detail in future posts in this series.

The Book of Hermits

The Book of Hermits is a work of impressive scholarship, and one can feel the author’s enthusiasm and affection for eremitism in every sentence of this book. It attempts to cover the entire world history of hermit lifestyles, and it largely succeeds, which is a remarkable feat. If there is one problem with the book, it is that the sections often feel just a little bit short, more like a detailed encyclopedia than an immersive tale.

Rodriguez covers an immense amount of ground. He begins with eremitism in Western antiquity, covering the history of hermits from Diogenes of Sinope and the Stoic and Epicurean movements all the way to the Desert Fathers. This is a history of around 700 years, and even with the focus on hermits and hermit lifestyles, it still seems too much to cover in only fifteen pages of the book. Make no mistake: these are wondrous pages, written from a position of deep knowledge about the subject and giving a wealth of information on the topic. Still, one wishes that the book was just a little bit longer, to give these stories more space to breathe.

The Book of Hermits is a work of impressive scholarship, and one can feel the author’s enthusiasm and affection for eremitism in every sentence of this book.