My friend and colleague, Marika Rose, has organized a Sister Death book event on my book at An Und Für Sich (AUFS), a blog that has had an outsized influence on my academic career. So far Marika has posted a beautiful introduction to the book. And my friend and colleague Adam Kotsko has posted a brilliant response to my claim that the Nicene Creed established an enmity between God and death. I’m looking forward to seeing the new responses that emerge over the next week or two.
I haven’t posted anything on AUFS since 2019, when I organized a book event on Eric Meyer’s Inner Animalities. And much of what I posted in the years prior to that were contributions to the various book events hosted there. But, when I was in grad school, I posted several short essays that were incredibly fun to write, relevant to my research, and idiosyncratic enough to be unpublishable anywhere else. So I was grateful to AUFS for that. But my affections for it run deeper.
Adam started AUFS in 2007, after migrating his first blog—The Weblog (started in 2002 or 2003)—from Blogspot. I must have discovered AUFS in 2008. I wasn’t yet on Twitter (I only joined Twitter because AUFS people were on it). Instead, I discovered it through a good old fashioned (pre-SEO optimization) Internet search. I was in a master’s program, trying to understand this new movement in my field that I kept hearing about: radical orthodoxy. The only people I knew who’d heard about it were into it. But I wanted to understand why it made me feel so uncomfortable.
I stumbled onto Adam Kotsko and Anthony Paul Smith’s scathing critiques of “Radox” or “RO” on AUFS. And not only did they provide me with the perspective I needed, I felt like I’d discovered some kindred irreverent spirits in a field that I felt awkward and out of place in. I met Anthony at a conference, in 2009. And he introduced me to Adam. And they introduced me to their friends. AUFS was an online community space that brought us together, when we were geographically distant between conferences. Over time Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook, I suppose) consumed and appropriated that community space. I remember Adam lamenting the way that the once copious comments section moved off the blog, and onto Twitter. Now that Twitter has become whatever thing it is now, and Facebook continues to feel like a weird dead zone, I’m nostalgic for the AUFS of the late 2000s and 2010s!
I’ve tried to convince Adam to get onto Substack, or even to migrate AUFS to its own Substack. And maybe he will, at some point. But I suspect that he probably also feels some responsibility to preserve the incredible archive of almost twenty years of posts, for its more than 12,000 subscribers. He is a scholar, after all, so he understands the power of an archive.
At any rate, this week I’ve been looking back through my own AUFS archive, and I wanted to share an old essay with you: something I wrote about hermits (more specifically the North Pond Hermit, who lived in the Maine woods) in 2013. Hermits are species of the underworld, in a sense, don’t you think? They inhabit the underworld of our social spaces. I’ve lightly edited the piece for readability (I couldn’t help myself).
Strangers & Hermits
A hermit not a recluse or a shut-in—someone who remains indoors, to avoid strangers. Instead, a hermit is someone who creates a geographical barrier between herself and the public, the polis. This remove, this distance, is the source of the hermit’s strange power. I don’t think a hermit avoids strangers. I think a hermit chooses to make all of human life a stranger. Hermits have the power to illuminate the strangeness of our lives.
Maybe it’s because I once lived in Maine, and I romanticize the Maine woods. Or maybe it’s because I enjoy solitude and have always been drawn to hermits. Whatever the reason, I was captured by the “capture” of the North Pond Hermit, in western Maine.
As the story goes, a man named Christopher Knight was recently “captured” after having lived alone, in the Maine backwoods for twenty-seven years. He must have left for this sojourn before he was of legal drinking age. He was only “discovered” because he had apparently been stealing food from camp kitchens to stock his larder. The police considered him a criminal and he was charged with more than 1000 burglaries.
I was initially a little shocked to learn that police had to employ the aid of game wardens, in order to make this “capture.” Game wardens, of course, are trained in wildlife management. It’s almost as if the police were trying to trap and detain a mountain lion, or a bear. Apparently, he surrendered his goods and fell to the ground as soon as he saw the officers. But even after this, the police officers continued to narrate their investigation as though Knight were something other than human. They seemed to find his entire way of life unimaginable. They could not fathom the twenty-seven Maine winters he spent in a nylon tent. It was unthinkable, to one of the police officers, that Knight (who is clean-shaven) had not seen himself in a mirror for more than twenty years and had only glimpsed his own reflection briefly in pools of water.
There is something mythic about Knight’s tale. Occupying some exceptional state, outside of human civilization, The North Pond Hermit assumes the status of myth. These news narratives seem to relegate him to a kind of inhuman space—both “too much” (too incredible, too mythic) and “too little” (too misanthropic, too antisocial) for a human life. Incidentally, the courts have set his bail high, hoping to keep him in jail where he might be protected against media queries, and other forms of human exploitation.
I guess I’ve always been drawn to the lives of hermits. I love the tales of wild hermits in the ancient hagiographies. I loved Edward Burger’s documentary “Amongst White Clouds”—on Chinese Zen Buddhist hermits, living in the Zhongnan Mountain range. There is something about the hermit that seems vaguely but inherently “religious” to me. Part of it, perhaps, is that hermitage, a life that’s lived on the frayed edges of the human, is often raw and disconcerting. It draws close to shock and awe.
Hermitage is the life of Saint Syncletica—whose living jaw, it was reported by Pseudo-Athanasius in her hagiography, had been eaten through by worms. And, yet, it would seem that the life of Knight cannot quite be compared to the life of religious hermits, like the Zen Buddhist monks. They are sealed off from human culture and dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom, enlightenment, etc... Knight, on the other hand, never really learned how to hunt or fish. As isolated as he was, he survived through theft—stealing food, books, and clothing, from camps in the mountains and the countryside near his hut. While religious hermits have placed the morality and wisdom of tradition at the core of their lifeways, Knight’s own hermitage seems built on the immoral act of theft.
This seems to mark a sharp distinction between these forms of hermitage, as if by their association with a complex tradition like Zen Buddhism, these hermits have passed through initiatory rites of what Agamben (in The Highest Poverty) addresses as the “commonplace” or common life of the monk. Knight, however, has only passed through the decidedly less communal “common life” of American public education. He exists in a context where the sacralized transition from common life into forms of hermitage may be close to extinction. Knight sits alone, below his tarp in the woods, listening to Rush Limbaugh on the AM radio, living off the spoils of his theft.
And, yet, it would be too easy, too simple, to suggest that there is a clean bifurcation to be made between these forms of hermitage. There is something excessive about the way Knight, himself, narrates his acts of theft. He insists on describing the shoes he wears as “stolen shoes.” When asked what sort of reading materials he prefers, he responded calmly: “whatever I can steal.” His theft seems conscientious, almost performative. Additionally, reading about the food he was stealing from these camps, I had to wonder how much of it would have been thrown out as uneaten waste. I had to wonder whether the shoes he stole, or the books he stole, were already destined for the trash, or for a donation bin.
This isn’t to condone these acts of theft, but merely to point out that their potentially trivial nature highlights the thin line between waste and value, or between waste and productivity, in the world we inhabit. His acts of theft weren’t moral, but there is a weird timbre of prophetic condemnation to them. Additionally, I should note that when asked how Knight would spend his winters (when he refused to venture out past the confines of his encampment), he claimed to have spent them mostly reading and meditating.
There is something exceptional about the hermitic way of life. The hermit has made the decision to exempt herself, or himself, from a human social life. This elected inhumanity seems to serve as a kind of mirror that reflects back onto human life. It’s here, I think, where the power of the hermit seems to function.
The fact that state police employed the aid of game wardens to “capture” this tidy, spectacled man doesn’t indicate that he is wilder than other humans, or unruly as a black bear confronted by human intruders. It doesn’t tell us anything about the hermit. Rather, the opacity of the hermit, the distance of the hermit, the hermit as strangest stranger, seemed to beguile the police. In the process, the hermit reveals to us the brutality of a police state that pursues what it does not understand— ready and waiting to use an exceptional apparatus to detain a man who has stolen ground burger meat, dirty sneakers, and an out of print novel. All of this inhumanity of our police state, as the hermit reveals to us, serves as a contrast to the sometimes more liveable inhumanities that make for the strange hospitality of the Maine backwoods.