Word: hermit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...spent most of the hike down the rim of Qaddisha Valley worrying not so much what would happen if I slipped and fell down the mountain gorge, but about the social protocols of visiting with a hermit. After all, hermits, by definition have chosen solitude over company - particularly strangers popping in uninvited. But Our Lady of Hawka Monastery, a 13th century shrine built into the side of the valley's red sandstone cliffs and one of the region's last functioning hermitages, is considered something of a national treasure in Lebanon. Even if phoning ahead to arrange an audience...
...some key moment in his contemplation of divine creation? Or more likely, what if the reason he renounced a life of earthly pleasures was to get away from the likes of foreign journalists for whom he is a fascinating curiosity? Surely someone who chooses the life of a hermit has what those of us who work in the urban corporate economy might call "people issues...
...Despite my trepidation, it turns out that the only ritual required in requesting an audience with the hermit is a knock on the door. Father Dario emerges from his quarters wearing a black cowl and a warm smile. He explains that although he has many visitors - some of whom wake him in the middle of the night, or use his pencils to graffiti their names on the walls of his cell - all are welcome. It is the duty of Christian hermits, he explained, to serve both God and humanity through prayer and penitence, and that apparently includes suffering fools gladly...
...Indeed, hermitism in the Catholic Church and its eastern branches is not some kind of a primal escape to nature and freedom, but a role defined by canonical law and subject to the discipline and hierarchy of the Church. To become a hermit, one first has to be either a member of a monastic order, or to be consecrated by a bishop. Father Dario had been a Catholic priest living in Florida and making $200 an hour working as a psychologist when God told him to give up his worldly possessions and take on the contemplative life. But the Word...
...involved throws me all the time. People like Proust and Melville please me. They don't waste words." He denounced and avoided the critical cult of personality; "I made it a point never to use the word I in an essay, an article," he told Ollman. Though hardly a hermit, he avoided the community of critics and the proximity of the people he wrote about. "Anonymity and coolness... writing film-centered criticism rather than self-centered criticism," was one of the seven "Critical Precepts" that he and Patricia Patterson - Manny's intimate collaborator in his writing, arting...