empty-chair

“....No! Some men are rocks, some men are islands, I’m a bloody island!” If you thought that Hugh Grant’s character in About a Boy had a pretty good deal going until he let all those people into his life, then this blog may be for you. Chronicling a series of films regarding men who, for whatever reason, said “Thank you, but I’ve had enough, and I’m going now. So long society! Goodbye culture! Hello me.”, I hope to provide those of you possessive of a wry sense of humor a peek into another, some might say superior, way of being: the way of the hermit.

We begin with About a Boy, based on the best-selling novel by Nick Hornby, and from which the opening quotation is drawn. Hugh Grant plays the character of Will, a Hip, wealthy, 30ish, London-dwelling bachelor living off the royalties of a kitschy christmas song penned by his deceased father. Will divides his day into increments of time: sleep – 10 hours; breakfast – 30 minutes; exercise – 45 minutes; video games – 90 minutes; dinner with fair-weather friends – 60 minutes. Sounds priceless, right? Alas, he lacked both the strength and the will to sustain the ideal lifestyle, and was eventually cajoled back into the existential muck of meaningful human relationships. Although his story is ultimately of the betrayal of one’s own ideals, Will proves that a hermetic lifestyle is theoretically feasible even in a dense urban environment. Click here to read more

From the steamy streets of London we head both west and north, or east and south, depending on one’s perspective, to the frozen refuge that is the Alaskan frontier. Alone in the Wilderness is a self-shot documentary film chronicling the odyssey of Naturalist Richard Louis Proenneke who, at the age of 67, built from hand a log cabin on the shore of Twin Lakes, now a part of Lake Clark National Park. Proenneke grew his own vegetables, hunted local wildlife in season, and recorded copious notes on the natural environment around him. He spent the next 30 years in near total isolation, living off the land, and braving winter temperatures of - 40 degrees F, his primary contact with the outside world that of a semi-annual resupply drop from a single engine Alaskan bush plane.

Alaska is quite the lonesome magnet, as evidenced by our next film Into the Wild, based on the novel by Jon Krakauer. Starring Emile Hirsch playing the real-life character of Chris McCandless, the film chronicles the journey of McCandless, a wandering unsettled soul, across the United States. Vehemently refusing to employ the use of either a map or a compass, his journey culminated in an abandoned Alaskan moose hunting camp, where he starved to death within walking distance of a trail. Let this serve as warning, the unprepared hermit is a hungry hermit.

Our library is replete with many other wonderful stories of men who flee, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden comes to mind, but I shall leave you with these three. If, on a day like today, you find yourself struggling to suppress the wanderlust, perhaps you can check out one of these films and wander vicariously.