Reading about re-integrating into society from solitude

June 5, 2022 8:51 AM

I am looking for stories or books about people who spent long periods of time in solitude (hermits, people on expeditions, monks, other recluses) making the choice to re-integrate with society.

I'd like discussion of how they made the choice to become a recluse, how they made the choice to go back, and what the process of returning was like on both a spiritual and practical level. I am most interested in discussion of the act and process of returning, not on the solitude itself.

I'm generally looking for people who have been reclusive for more than a year or two. People who have occasional interactions with others are fine, but I'm not looking for stories of people who retreated with/into small groups of likeminded people.

posted by wesleyac to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

Diane Perry grew up in London spent several years living as Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo in an isolated cave in Tibet before returning to Europe. Read Vicki Mackenzie’s biography Cave in the Snow.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:27 PM on June 5, 2022

Actually although it fails your "not looking for stories of people who retreated with/into small groups of likeminded people" test. Monica Baldwin, in I Leap Over the Wall, is much stronger on the process of return to the outside world after ~3 decades as a strict contemplative. In 1941 "I had never heard of the Unknown Soldier, Jazz, Isolationism, Lounge lizards, Lease-Lend, Cavalcade, Gin-and-It, Vimy Ridge or the Lambeth Walk; neither did the words Nosey Parker, Hollywood, Cocktail, Robot, Woolworth, Strip-tease, Bright Young Thing, convey anything to my mind. Unknown names, too, were always cropping up: Epstein, Schiaparelli, James Agate, Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence and Dr. Marie Stopes"
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:15 PM on June 5, 2022

You may find the story of the North Pond Hermit of interest. A man named Christopher Thomas Knight wandered off into the woods in Maine and didn't come out again for 27 years. Here's an article from GQ. There are a handful of articles linked from his Wikipedia page.
Here's a slightly more recent one from the Atlantic.
I think there was an FPP on him, but I'm not finding it anywhere obvious.
posted by vortex genie 2 at 2:31 PM on June 5, 2022

North Pond Hermit previously, previouslier, previousliest
posted by vortex genie 2 at 2:36 PM on June 5, 2022

Fiction, but Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer features a woman who chooses to be a wilderness researcher in solitude and eventually comes down off the mountain.
posted by geek anachronism at 4:51 PM on June 5, 2022

In Love with The World
posted by sxtrumpeto at 5:12 PM on June 5, 2022

Karen Armstrong's 2005 memoir The Spiral Staircase is about something like this. The publisher's description:

Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey. In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy—marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.

She wrote two books about the same experience, Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World, just after they happened. She seems now to disavow them for being confused and inaccurate. They could still be worth checking out, to compare the immediate perspective of the earlier books with the more considered later version.
posted by rollick at 8:15 AM on June 6, 2022