. . . sometimes, searching for the imaginary can accidentally lead one to
find a bit of useful reality.? Those searching for the Northwest Passage,
for example, mapped an awful lot of terrain.—Thomas Wiloch on the work of Evan S. Connell
of a sandstone pinnacle, one man alone with God & thousands of finger-stone
formations in the untilled wilds of Metéora:? the soaring rocks.
Other hermits followed.? After fifty years of living in high caves, the monks began
building
precarious monasteries, twenty-three in all, until monastic compounds
perched everywhere, ornate thimbles on the weathered fingertips of Metéora.
Historical details catch in my spam filter.? My strings get all tangled up
imagining hermits who abandoned the surface world to dwell in fossilized
tree houses & pray among vultures — & how it took only fifty years of living aloft,
holy cavemen in high exile, before they begin reinventing civilization.
I have no statistics regarding the number of hermits returning to caves these days.
Im sure its hard for statisticians to track that sort of trend.