Chesterton defends the hermit...

[creationism]

"The reason why even the normal human being should be half

a hermit is that it is the only way in which his mind can have a

half-holiday. It is the only way to get any fun even out of the facts

of life; yes, even if the facts are games and dances and operas.

It bears most resemblance to the unpacking of luggage.

It has been said that we live on a railway station; many of us live in a luggage van;

or wander about the world with luggage that we never unpack at all.

For the best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has

already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they would

agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love,

often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or inconclusive.

Mere society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances,

the real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them.

Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from

crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life.

They are like men always hungry, because their food never digests;

also, like those men, they are cross.

There is surely something the

matter with modern life when all the literature of the young is so cross.

That is something of the secret of the saints who went into the desert.

It is in society that men quarrel with their friends; it is in solitude

that they forgive them.

And before the society-man criticises the saint,

let him remember that the man in the desert often had a soul that was

like a honey-pot of human kindness, though no man came near to taste it;

and the man in the modern salon, in his intellectual hospitality,

generally serves out wormwood for wine."

- G.K. Chesterton