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Thoreau’s approach was closer to the Eastern
school. Hermits in ancient China and Japan
weren’t seeking God so much as fleeing Man.
They’d wander the high passes, living simply,
taking refuge from the corruption of the
modern world. Sipping, as Thoreau put it,
“the tonic of wildness.” The more a hermit
gave up, the more meaningful the sacrifice.
I began to wonder whether I could ever make
that sacrifice. Would it mean anything if I
did? Was that even a useful question? These
are the acorns Walden plants in your mind.
If I was going to take Thoreau at his word,
I’d have to do it “not only theoretically, but
practically.” He was a big believer in doing
things. As luck would have it, a friend had
lent me his cottage in Victoria’s Dandenong
Ranges, so I decided to drive up to spend time
alone among the trees.
The house looked suitably rustic: built from
logs, daubed in white plaster, perched on a
hillside facing west. Spiders had colonised
the eaves, and the surrounding forest was a
primeval tangle of stringybark and yellow box.
Thoreau might have raised an eyebrow at the
shower, couch and cast-iron wood heater
(he considered even a rug to be ostentatious),
but it was the best I could do on short notice.
I brought with me to the cabin: beans,
potatoes, beetroot, corn, matches, newspaper,
a knife, high-tensile string, a few clothes,
a sleeping bag and a torch. The vegetables
were the same ones Thoreau grew in a small
plot behind his cabin. A survivalist on TV
had recommended the string. By the second
day, having had no reason to tie or bind
anything, I was mostly using it to measure the
circumference of various cylindrical objects
(chair legs: 6.6 centimetres).
I used no electricity. No phone. No wi-fi.
No heating, apart from an amateurish fire.
I’d brought no entertainment or distractions.
No books, music or newspapers. I also
happened to be missing the 2017 AFL Grand
Final – a sacrifice which, I felt, Thoreau would
have appreciated. My meals were boiled
vegetables, unsalted and truly awful.Of course, the essence of hermeticism
isn’t hardship, per se. Isolation is probably
nearer the mark. You can be a hermit in a
Tokyo high-rise, blinking in the glow of a
computer monitor, the floor littered with
empty Coke cans. The Japanese call them
hikikomori (literally ‘pulling inward’): a social
phenomenon in which adolescents, often
from wealthy families, confine themselves to a
single room or apartment, sometimes for years- many until they die. They’ve been dubbed
the ‘postmodern hermits’ – a psychological
regression from the stresses of modern-day
life. Turtles retreating inside digital shells.
Hikikomori are a far cry from Christian
enlightenment, but most modern hermits
seem to follow a similar, anti-climactic
trajectory. There was Manfred Gnädinger,
known only as ‘Man’, who survived on Spain’s
Galician coast, speaking to no-one, until a
freak oil spill destroyed his home. He was
found dead in his hut a few days later. There
was Christopher Knight, who lived in a
boulder-choked forest in Maine for 27 years,
raiding nearby houses for food. (Terrified
locals called him “the Hungry Man.”) When
pressed by a journalist for some hard-earned,
elemental wisdom, all he could come up with
was, “Get enough sleep.”Real hermits, according to Knight, didn’t
write books, and they didn’t answer questions.
“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” he told
curious reporters. “I just did it.”..........................................
If there’s a lesson in the wilderness, it’s
learning how low your threshold for boredom
truly is. The tedium is a genuine pest,
gnawing and unshakeable. It was only a
ludicrously short amount of time before I
was reduced to Count of Monte Cristo-like
behaviour: counting the number of stones
in the hearth (43) or the number of paces
between the kitchen and the couch (12).Perhaps there’s a reason we live, as Thoreau
said, “lives of quiet desperation”: doing
nothing, it turns out, is hard work, and
acknowledging the paradox doesn’t alleviate
the symptoms. You’re not reading, you’re not
listening to music, you’re not switching off in
front of a screen. There’s no responsibility to
do or achieve anything with your time.
Mostly I sat and looked at trees.Boredom might be an obstacle on the path
to enlightenment, but it didn’t feel like I was
edging closer to any fundamental truth. It
was more like swimming above a great depth.
There’s something horrible about looking
down and having no frame of reference. No
bottom to your world. Your senses start flailing
for stimuli, a sound or a surface. Anything to
distract from the big, gaping... emptiness.
I needed some air. Time to go for a walk – one
of the hermit’s few permitted entertainments.Behind my cabin was a switchback track
meandering up the slope, and at the end of the
track, a clearing on the ridge. Someone had
placed a bench there, fixed towards the sunset.
I took a seat.Critics say Thoreau romanticised the wild.
Author John Updike said Walden risked being
“as revered and unread as the Bible.” And if
you examine the story more closely, the shine
does tarnish a little. Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t far
from civilisation. He took regular walks into
town. His mother even did his laundry. People
have blamed his writing for the death of
unprepared nature-seekers, like McCandless:
wanderers who fell in love with an ideal,
rather than an idea.I sat on that bench for a long time. Overhead,
the breeze rustled the eucalyptus leaves – that
curious arboreal sigh. The critics may have a
point, but for a moment there, just a moment,
I could almost feel what Thoreau was shooting
at, like an apple slightly beyond arm’s reach. The
fundamental hermit truth. A grain of desert
wisdom he found, and brought back. “Simplify,”
he wrote. “Simplify, simplify.” The sun went
down. I wandered back to my cabin in the
woods. And then back home, to the city. •IT TURNS OUT DOING
NOTHING IS HARD WORK,
AND ACKNOWLEDGING
THE PARADOX DOESN’T
ALLEVIATE THE SYMPTOMS.