The World Needs a Hermit in the Woods

Small forests inside us

Photographs and video by John Patrick Weiss

I have been photographing people who are alone.

Like the young salesman pacing the front lot of a car dealership and stopping now and then in his solitude to stare down at his shoes, lost in thought. Or the short-sighted man sitting in a women’s clothing boutique among voiceless, frozen mannequins.

I thought maybe he was waiting for someone, but then he got up and left alone.

Or the woman walking in my neighborhood who lingered by a stop sign to look at the trees, then at her hands, then down at the ground, as if confused or disoriented or gripped by sorrow.

And yet none of these people looked abandoned. Or broken. Or lost.

They seemed to be looking inward.

In an outdoor shopping mall I photograph a man on a bench. He checks his phone, perhaps reading emails or listening to music. Then he puts the phone in his pocket and sits there, looking down at his shoes.

A breeze lifts his hair. Palm trees sway behind him. People and cars move past.

He remains still.

Where has he gone, I wonder. What is this place we retreat to in quiet moments, when the outside world dissolves like vapor and we traverse an inner landscape of memories and fears and dreams and passing thoughts.

What is this thing that pulls us there?

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I have seen the woman by the stop sign in my neighborhood before.

Once she stood planted like a statue beside an old tree, bent forward slightly, as if the tree were whispering secrets meant only for her. Then she looked up at the blue sky, or maybe at the house finches in the branches overhead.

She stood there awhile. Then she resumed walking, as if steadied by whatever had passed through her.

On another day I lift my camera and capture a chef leaning over a kitchen counter.

He is motionless as servers and patrons pass by. It is as if something has frozen him in time. He has stopped preparing meals and appears briefly lost within himself. Before I leave the window, a waitress says something to him, and he straightens and returns to his work.

I wonder where he went in that quiet moment.

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These photographs are ordinary scenes. Nothing announces itself as remarkable or meaningful.

Yet when I look at them, I sense that each person has briefly stepped away from the visible world. As if they wandered down a forest path into an open meadow of sunlight and grass and warmth.

An interior sanctuary where the noise recedes and something older begins to breathe.

I recently read Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. Then I watched the film. It affected me so deeply that my wife bought the DVD for me, knowing I would return to it.

I have watched it several times now. Each time it leaves me with the same hush.

The story follows a man whose life becomes shaped by long stretches of solitude. Work in forests and along train tracks. Loss that cannot be repaired. Years that pass without spectacle.

His aloneness is not dramatic. It is simply the terrain he walks.

At one point a woman who lives in a forest watchtower tells him that the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. Like him, she has lost someone she loves. She understands pain.

She understands the healing power of solitude.

I have been thinking about that line while looking at my photographs. About how often we become hermits without intending to. An afternoon alone. A season after loss. A job that requires waiting. A quiet shift when no one comes through the door.

Perhaps our souls need that more than we admit.

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On a cold, windy day I came across a feral cat in a commercial parking lot.

Its fur lifted in the gusts. It moved cautiously between cardboard debris and scrub. When it noticed me, it approached partway, not boldly but with tentative hope.

It paused a few feet away and studied my face.

There was hunger in that pause. Or perhaps a question.

We regarded one another across the distance. Then something in the cat shifted. Maybe my voice frightened it.

It turned and began to walk toward the darker edge of the lot, toward brush and shadow. Not hurried. Not frightened. Not unlike the way we sometimes retreat from the world.

I stood there after the cat had gone, longer than I needed to.

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When I was a boy, there was a destitute man my father helped. His name was Ted Strollo. He had come from Italy many years earlier and lived mostly in the woods outside town.

One evening he wandered into town and was struck by a car.

My father witnessed the accident and went to the hospital with him. Later he brought Ted home to recover. My father, an attorney, helped him secure modest state benefits and a small apartment.

But Ted remained a hermit at heart.

He argued with a small radio in his apartment as if it were an adversary. He distrusted most comforts. Even in that small room he carried the woods with him. There was something in him that felt old and weathered and slightly feral. Not broken. Simply shaped by long companionship with solitude.

As a boy I did not understand Ted.

I only sensed that he belonged to another landscape. Now, when I think of the man in Train Dreams moving through forests and loss, I think of Ted. I think of how some people never fully leave their wilderness, even when they live among us. And I wonder if we mistake that for damage.

Perhaps there is dignity in remaining close to one’s meadow in the woods.

When I look at the man outside the dealership, or the woman beneath the stop sign, or the chef frozen over his counter, I do not see loneliness. I see small forests opening inside ordinary lives. I see people briefly held by the quiet breezes of their own thoughts.

Cars move through intersections. Doors open and close. Screens glow. The world marches onward with its mechanical noises and relentless pace.

Yet in parking lots and quiet shops and kitchen counters and neighborhood sidewalks, something necessary is happening. A listening. A pause.

A return to the self beneath the noise.

The world may need preachers and blinking screens and constant change. It may need commerce and technology and endless advancement.

But it also needs its hermits.

And sometimes, without naming it, that hermit is us.

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