I am fascinated by human solitude. I learned of the Russian orthodox concept of the poustinia years ago, but only very cursorily. It is a tradition of retreating in solitude to a designated cabin in the woods, to sit in silence and contemplate God. Essentially, a form of meditation. This notion stuck to my mind, without me really pursuing it further – until a few months ago when I chanched upon this volume at a local second hand bookstore. I figured I should honor the coincidence, and bought the book.
It is written by a russian-born Canadian social worker baroness named Catherine de Hueck Doherty. She felt the need to spread the Russian orthodox teachings in the anglosphere, so she founded a religious community in Ontario and wrote this book. Reading religious literature of this kind is a novel experience to me, and I found it fascinating to enter into the mindset of a believer. There wasn’t all that much information about poustinia, but apparently it means desert, and is meant to recall the desert fathers of the 3nd century, like John of Chrysostom or Arsenius the Great. I actually had a kind of poustinik lifestyle for a while, when i lived in the Norwegian countryside (in the sense that I led a semi-hermetic lifestyle). That is what for me is the lure of the poustinik, the withdrawal into the mental world, to contemplative, meditative states. Some religious traditions involve meditative or trance-like prayer, like the yogic and dervish practices in the hindu and sufi traditions. The jewish tradition has a practice called davening, physically engaging prayer by mental recital and bodily rocking back and forth.
My grandmother’s sister was a nun, and my great grandfather was a rabbi, so religious perspectives are present in my family history, even though I was raised extremely atheist. Or, I’d actually prefer the term, non-religious, because to me atheism often entails a modicum of militancy.
I can’t say i learned a lot from this book, but it was a new experience that wakened my dormant interest in French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Russian religious thinkers like Rozanov, Berdyaev and Shestov. Croyant thinking is so foreign to me that it intrigues me. It was almost written as a self-help book, with a quite loose style. Some details from the time it was written was amusing to read, like “I felt, as the young people say nowadays, ‘wiped out'”, or references to movies like Nicholas and Alexandra, and books like Black Like Me.
Kinship of all Species 