"If I say I want to sail a small boat all the way around the world and it will take me two years, everyone says, 'Oh how exciting!' If I say I want to go and sit in my house..."

"... and not talk to anyone for two years, they say 'Have you got mental health issues?' or 'Why are you so selfish?'... I joke that wanting to be solitary is bad, sad and mad. It's immoral because it's selfish. It's sad because it'll make you miserable and it's mad because you must be a nutcase.... Silence is a place in which I can find ecstasy. I only get it in silence and most people I know only get it in silence. It is just a fabulous feeling. You know, you're walking along and quite suddenly you just say, 'Yes!' It's an extraordinarily intense response. Totally joyful.... I'm trying to position myself so the gift of mystical prayer is available to me, because actually the presence of God is a terrifically nice experience. I think it's heaven! Literally. I think that is what it will be like in heaven, that extraordinary sense of fulfilled intimacy - that feeling that one desires from sex, which is of both being completely yourself and completely with another person, is I think, what prayer does for me. It's a very particular form of intimate conversation with another, and it just so happens the other is God.... Food just tasted fabulous. But it wasn't it tasted particularly fabulous in any mysterious sense it just tasted MORE. So porridge tasted of PORRIDGE. But it also affected things like how strongly you experience physical things, like baths. Baths were fabulous - they weren't just some warm water, they became a completely luxurious experience. When you got cold, you got incredibly incredibly cold, or incredibly wet and just FELT it."

Said Sarah Maitland, quoted in "Why this man became a hermit at 20" (BBC). For some reason, the article's headline only refers to Christopher Knight, whose story is told in "The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit." Maitland's book is "A Book Of Silence."