The hermit keeps a window open onto the sky, without which the world would perish from suffocation, ugliness and boredom. He is the only one, along with the poet, who still speaks the language of the beyond, who makes existence sacred, who gives life this verticality without which humanity is buffeted about beneath itself. He is a rampart against the assaults of mediocrity, nastiness, hatred that is intolerant of its opposite. He is this force, made out of weakness, that warms the atmosphere, melts the winter of the world. For men turned toward secondary things, his presence recalls the existence of the essential things: the order of the world, knowledge, the priority of salvation and the adoration of the Supreme, by imitating the sunflower whose heliotropism has much to teach us, who never turns away from the trisolar brightness. Model and prototype, the hermit represents, in a chaotic and dehumanized world, a final landmark, an ultimate axis for reference. He allows man to remain standing by recalling the Absolute; when deprived of the Totality, man becomes totalitarian by compensation.
— Jean Biès
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