I found something really cool and felt like sharing it

So recently (past maybe 6 months) ive been trying to read. like in general because before 2023 i didnt like picking up books and reading. im currently on my 10th book and it was a book i bought because it reminded me of a book i already read. So the first book i read of these types is “The Psychopath Test” – Jon Ronson.

Still cant get over how much i liked that book but thats not the book i want to talk about right now…

so the book i found that reminded me of the Jons book was “How to Be Alone” – Sara Maitland. This book is a guide, plus has stories of people who were borderline hermits and her own experience in being alone.

ANYWAYS on to the main event, ive been slacking in reading this book so I picked it up tonight and she tells me ab this guy.

^(Anthony the Great (AD 251-356) is widely credited as the first Christian hermit and the founding father of monasticism. In 285 he went out into the Egyptian desert and lived in complete isolation in a ruined fort at Der el Memum (Pispir) for twenty years. Athanasius, his friend and biographer, describes his emergence from this long solitude in some detail. Anthony announced his intention of coming out and sent for some local workmen to help him dismantle his protective ‘fortifications’. This attracted a curious crowd who, Athanasius says, were all very ‘surprised’ to find he was neither emaciated nor deranged, suggesting clearly that this was the expectation. But he emerged physically fit and eminently in his right mind. Despite these negative expectations, the rest of Anthony’s life seems remarkably sane; and he lived to an extremely old age (105) After this teaching period, he withdrew again into solitude, which he pursued with ‘joyful determination’ on his so-called inner moun-ain’. This second period of solitude, which lasted for the remaining forty-five years of his life, lacked the extremity and rigor of his time in Pispir. He freely met and talked with those who came out to see him, sometimes walked back to visit his community in Pispir and, according to Athanasius, went twice to Alexandria. He was very much loved and expected, partly for his serene good humor and tranquil heart. Oddly enough, the fact that he remained abundantly normal did not change the common terror that solitude was likely to drive people mad. Anthony’s life pattern, a period of training, a period of extreme isolation, followed by teaching and public ministry and then a gentler withdrawal into seclusion, has been repeated ever since with surprising frequency and across a range of cultures.)

LIKE BRO WAS NOT EVEN IN THE 4 DIGITS AND SURPASSED 100!!! I swear on my life it was because he didn’t have the stress of having to deal with other people.

yea that’s all i wanted to show uhh im VERY slowly reading through this so there might be more of these especially since a lot of this stuff is not information to me

by Expensive-Gate-9263