"An endless list of writers and painters and philosophers and scientists have been described as hermits, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Emily Bronte, and Vincent Van Gogh. Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, withdrew from public life for thirty years. 'All profound things,' he wrote, 'are preceded and attended by Silence.' Flannery O'Connor rarely left her rural farm in Georgia. Albert Einstein referred to himself as 'a loner in daily life.'
The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that 'no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.' The historian Edward Gibbon said that 'solitude is the school of genius'. Plato, Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Kafka have all been described as solitaries. 'Not till we have lost the world,' Thoreau wrote, 'do we begin to find ourselves.'"
Michael Finkel
The Stranger in the Woods: the Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
