I’m always on the lookout for creative types who lead or led an “alternative lifestyle.”
Recently, for example, I came across a woman named Hope Bourne (1920-2010), who lived for decades on the moors at Exmoor, Great Britain, in a broken-down “caravan” (basically, trailer), on virtually no money. She wrote, tramped the fields and woods, painted, drew, thought, grew her own vegetables, shot her own rabbits, and walked into the village every week or so to collect her mail and buy a loaf of bread and if she was flush, a bar or two of chocolate.
She considered herself wealthy in every way that matters. She was not a recluse, she emphasized: simply a solitary, with a wide circle of friends. You can view (fairly low-quality) YouTubes where she describes her life and philosophy. And I’m dying to read one or two of her books, which include Wild Harvest, Living on Exmoor, and Hope Bourne’s Exmoor Village.
Paul Erdős (Hungarian: 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) “was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.” [wiki]
He apparently spent almost his whole working life traveling about and simply descending upon the home of whoever would have him, with no advance warning and no end date.
“Described by his biographer, Paul Hoffman, as ‘probably the most eccentric mathematician in the world,’ Erdős spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase. Except for some years in the 1950s, when he was not allowed to enter the United States based on the accusation that he was a Communist sympathizer, his life was a continuous series of going from one meeting or seminar to another. During his visits, Erdős expected his hosts to lodge him, feed him, and do his laundry, along with anything else he needed, as well as arrange for him to get to his next destination.”
Another point in his favor: he was a total caffeine addict. He once tried to wean himself from the Ritalin and Benzedrine he’d started taking after the death of his mother and managed to last thirty days. “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict,” he afterward told the friend who’d bet him $500. “But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.”
He spent virtually every waking hour on his beloved mathematics and died with his boots on, of a heart attack, at a mathematics conference in Warsaw.
BREW ME UP A POT OF DARK ROAST!
Finally, we have a movement called Tang ping that really took off “in April, 2021, with a post by Luo Huazhong (username “Kind-Hearted Traveler”) on the internet forum Baidu Tieba, in which he discussed his reasons for living a low-key, minimalist lifestyle.
In 2016, 26-year-old Luo quit his factory job because it made him feel empty. He then cycled 1,300 miles from Sichuan to Tibet, and now back in his home town Jiande in eastern Zhejiang Province, spends his time reading philosophy, and gets by doing a few odd jobs and taking US$60 a month from his savings.He only eats two meals a day.
Luo’s post, entitled with “Lying Flat is Justice”, illustrates:
‘I can just sleep in my barrel enjoying a sunbath like Diogenes, or live in a cave-like Heraclitus and think about ‘Logos‘. Since there has never really been a trend of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land, I can create it for myself. Lying flat is my wise movement, only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.’”
Happy 4th of July, and I hope everyone gets some rest today. It’ll be 109 degrees today here in Tucson.
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