Sunshine Recorder

My Life as a Hermit

For five years this man lived a life of blissful solitude. But then Neil Ansell discovered why we can’t live alone. Here he reveals why…

I first came to this cottage when I was 30 years old, and for five years it was my only home, through summer and winter, through sickness and health. There have been many books written about people moving to the countryside; they almost form a mini-genre of their own – back-to-nature writing, or escape-to-the-country. Some of them have been very good, and some… well, not so good. Almost all have the same narrative arc. A family abandons a successful career in the city to pursue their dream of a rural idyll. They buy a derelict farmhouse in a remote area and set about making a new life for themselves. There will be various obstacles to be faced, perhaps even some dark nights of the soul, but eventually they will overcome, or else presumably the book would never have been written. My situation was somewhat different. […] I think I saw it as a challenge; almost as an extension of the challenge of the kind of hardcore travelling I had been doing for years. I would learn to stay still, I would learn to be alone. Perhaps like Thoreau 150 years before me I wanted to know just how little I needed in order to lead a fulfilling life.

What I found was not what you might expect. You might think that such protracted solitude would lead to introspection, to self-examination, to a growing self-awareness. But not for me. What happened to me was that I began to forget myself, my focus shifted almost entirely outwards to the natural world outside my window. It was as if we gain our sense of self from our interaction with other people; from the reflection of ourselves we see in the eyes of another. Alone, there was no need for identity, for self-definition.

The process was a gradual one. During my years in the hills I kept a journal. For the first year it is a conventional diary; places I had gone, things I had done. By the second year it is little more than a nature journal; what birds I had seen that day, perhaps some notes on the weather. By the third year it is no more than an almanac, marking the turn of the seasons by the comings and goings of migrant birds and their nesting dates, interspersed by the occasional detailed depiction of a moment, perhaps the flight of a single bird. I am an absence, a void, I have disappeared from my own story.