A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses [Paperback]

Isabel Colegate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2003

"Few books contain a cast of characters as fascinating as those who populate A Pelican in the Wilderness, Isabel Colegate's charming meander through the history of hermits and solitaries. Elegantly written...a small gem of a book."-- Wall Street Journal

From Lao-tse and the Buddha, St. Anthony and the early Celtic hermits, through Rousseau, Thoreau, Ruskin and down to the present day, certain gifted persons, each in his own way, have shown a vocation for living alone and apart, finding in simplicity and attention to Nature a spiritual space to be explored and rejoiced in. Others, retreating from the world in scorn or cut off from it by scandal, have found that solitude is Hell, a pit of melancholy and morbid fancy. In this, her first work of nonfiction, novelist Isabel Colegate gives us the lives of the solitaries--male and female, medieval and modern, divinely inspired and patently fraudulent. But this is no mere gallery of saints and sinners, poets and misanthropes. It is also a re-valuation of solitude for our times, and a reminder that it is in solitude that the soul meets itself, refreshes itself, and from there goes out to join the communal dance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Radio 4 Book of the Week reviews to follow --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Isabel Colegate is author of thirteen previous books, including the celebrated novels Winter Journey and The Shooting Party. Born in London, she has long lived near Bath.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (June 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582432384
• ISBN-13: 978-1582432380
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,400,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Antidote for the Modern Mass Mind, September 15, 2003

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OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses (Paperback)

It is nice to occasionally find a book that resonates at the same frequency as one's own soul. In my case, it was this perceptive and extremely well written study of hermits, solitaries, and recluses. It is not often in our modern world that the possibility, and legitimacy, of a solitary existance is examined in a sympathetic manner.

I do not think that I've seen a more comprehensive study of the phenomenon of the solitary lifestyle (Chinese and Tibetan hermits, the desert fathers, medieval anchorites, monastic and hermit religious orders, wandering holy men from Ireland to Russia, shamans, the pastoral posers of the 18th century, American mountain men, the New England transidentalists, eccentric noblemen, classical Stoics, Romantic poets, conservationists- even Howard Hughs!)

Clearly, this is a topic that resonates with the author too, but then as a writer that would seem only natural (i.e., she is a member of what has traditionally been considered the solitary profession.) She clearly understands the various motivations that come to drive individuals to a solitary existance, both voluntarily and involuntarily (love of nature, inspiration, world weariness, high sensitivity, preservation of the poetic ego, scopophobia, religious dedication, and the desire to find union with the Divine itself....)

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hermits Of All Kinds, Of All Times, March 5, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitaries (Hardcover)

We don't think much of loners; it is a word of suspicion. Loners are
those racist militia men or pedophiles. We are social creatures
and we have intimate relationships with a few, friendships with
many, and interactions with a legion. And yet there have been
solitary souls throughout history who are odd but not malevolent,
and it is easy to sympathize with them. "The idea of the hermit's
life - simplicity, devotion, closeness to nature - lurks somewhere
on the periphery of most people's consciousness, a way glimpsed,
oddly familiar, not taken." So writes Isabel Colgate in _A Pelican
in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and
Recluses_ (Counterpoint). As the subtitle shows, there are many
variations on the means and reasons by which people take themselves
away to themselves, and Colgate has provided a widely inclusive
discussion of the phenomenon.

Colgate is a novelist, and her ability
to write with sympathy about these loners makes her cheerful book a
delight to read. One instance after another of individual oddity
spills from her pages. Gilbert White, the famous
clergyman-naturalist of Selborne in Kent, built a thatched
hermitage and installed his brother there as a hermit, at least for
picnics. If the owner had enough money not only for a hermitage
but also for a hermit, he could hire one. In the eighteenth
century, Charles Hamilton hired a hermit, specified how he would
dress, how he must not cut his hair or nails, and how he must never
speak. The hermit would have been paid 700 guineas for a seven
year hitch, but lasted only three weeks before sneaking off to
the local pub. Mrs. Pobjoy was Beau Nash's last mistress in Bath,
and after his death in 1761 she moved into a hollow trunk and
stayed there until she died, perhaps from poverty and perhaps from
a broken heart. A contemporary "dendrite" was Julia Butterfly
Hill, who climbed a redwood in California in 1997 to save the tree
from a logging company. She stayed up it for two years, enduring
bad weather, hassles from security guards, and legal battles, but
the logging company eventually admitted defeat. Hermits
seek privacy, but often do something useful to make their living,
like tending herbal gardens, keeping bees, and (in the case of a
contemporary hermit Colgate interviews) painting heraldic
devices.

The span of Colgate's research is delightful. She covers
celebrity solitaries, like J. D. Salinger, Howard Hughes, and
Thoreau. Notables like Andrew Jackson, Louis XIV, Peter the Great,
and the Spanish emperor Charles V built grand buildings called
hermitages, and removed themselves there without austerity. Enkidu
was a kind of hermit before befriended by Gilgamesh. There was a
hermit pope in the middle ages, or rather Peitro de Maroni was
thought to be such a holy hermit that he was made pope, and was so
miserable that he lasted at the post only four years before he
was allowed to retire and resume isolation. The Catalan architect
Antonio Gaudi lived as a hermit in the last fifteen years of his
life beneath the unfinished spires of his great church of Santa
Sagrada in Barcelona; when he was run over by a tram, everyone
thought he was just an old tramp and there was no rush to get him
to a hospital, so he died. Colgate smiles at these oddballs, and
sympathizes, and because she cannot resist a good story,
has crammed her book with wonderful small portraits and revealing
anecdotes. It is a very enjoyable, rather disorganized, ramble
among those who for religion or politics or neurosis or simplicity
took themselves away, and yet are always with us.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wandering Pelican, May 9, 2002

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Solitary08 "beved8" (South Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitaries (Hardcover)

The author roves over many examples of solitary life, touching all too briefly on variants from the isolated spiritual hermit to the modern eccentric recluse. There is little evidence of in depth study of the life, rather a broadsheet offering glimpses on anyone who seems to have sought to live apart, for whatever reason.
If you are searching for a better understanding of what the solitary or silent life is, look elsewhere.