There seems to be two types of voluntary seclusionists, the hermit and the loner. The hermit is the person who seeks solitude for religious reasons. The loner is his secular counterpart, a person who seeks seclusion but not for religious reasons.
I am mostly interested in the loner because there are no vows involved and it's a possibility for everyone.
I use the term "loner" because it has no religious connotation. It's the only secular counterpart to a "hermit. Though many words refer to a religious person who lives in solitude: hermit, anchorite, recluse (this may be a secular term today, but its origin is religious; it meant a hermit who locks himself in his cell), I can't find any secular words, hence I have settled on loner.
The loner, as used here, is a person who purposefully seeks seclusion. He is not compelled. It is not a matter of physical health, or avoiding law enforcement. The loner is a person who could be in civilized company, but chooses to avoid it whenever possible.
So why does the loner seek seclusion? And when is it proper and when is it merely the action of a crank?
There are many possible reasons for seclusion. A person may simply hate the world and hate being around others. Some speculate that this is what drove J.D. Salinger into seclusion, though he does have commerce with others on occasion. It seems safe to place him in the "crank camp."
A loner may also have interests that aren't shared by others or that can only be undertaken in solitude. But even this wouldn't account for complete seclusion because a person generally needs breaks, and in these breaks he can discourse and visit with others. If a person is so wrapped up in his interest that he never takes breaks, it could be a proper type of seclusion, depending on the interest and his station in life (no father and husband can be a thorough loner without sinning against his wife and children). The interest could be intellectual, which is laudable, though still subject to the primordial sin of selfishness. The interest could be prayer, which would be the highest pursuit of all, but in that event the loner is kind of like a closet hermit (not a redundancy, I think), and hence no longer part of the secular definition of "loner." The interest could be child pornography, which is obviously disturbing. The interest might be endless TV and mindless Internet surfing, which is somewhat disturbing as well and already the subject of much contemporary analysis (e.g., Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone).
But I'm mostly interested in two other, related reasons for seclusion: the person shocked by what he sees in public life and the person fearful for his soul.
(So interested, in fact, that I didn't write any more on this topic and forgot I even wrote it until I came back to it while mining for FTN pieces.)
