One Solitary Life Trivia Quiz

Answer: St Jerome

Born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus around 350 CE, he converted to Christianity while a student in Rome. He spent about five years living as a hermit in the desert, during which time he started to learn Hebrew, which would later prove important for his work. Returning to a more social (although still ascetic) life, he first produced a revised Latin translation of the New Testament based on the Septuagint, a Greek manuscript. Later he followed the then-controversial path of producing a Latin translation of the Old Testament based on the earlier Hebrew texts rather than the Septuagint, on the basis that double-translation led to increased ambiguity and error. (It should be noted that modern scholars now doubt that his Hebrew was as strong as he claimed, and feel that his translation often used the Greek text to provide clarification.) As well as this major feat of translation, St. Jerome wrote extensive commentaries on Biblical texts, works of history and biography, and letters on a range of subjects. St Jerome is the patron saint of translators, librarians and encyclopedists.

Answer: Yoshida Kenko

Yoshida Kenko, who was born around 1280, and died around 1350, was originally named Urabe Kaneyoshi, and had a career as an officer of the guards for the Imperial palace. After his retirement from that position, he changed his name, became a Buddhist monk, and took up life as a hermit.

It was during this time that he wrote the collection of 243 essays that were collected and published after his death as 'Tsurezuregusa'. These were written in a stream-of-consciousness manner (students of Japanese script would appreciate the significance of the brush-stroke technique he used) and became almost instantly popular as a source of reflections on nature and the meaning of life.

Answer: Julian of Norwich

Little is known of her life, not even her actual name - her usual name comes from the church where she lived in an anchorite's cell, a small room built against the church wall which the inhabitant never left. We do know that she was born in 1342, and suffered a near-death experience in 1373, which led to her recording the visions associated with that experience. About twenty years later she expanded this with theological reflections on the significance of the visions, published as 'Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love'.

This is considered the first book to have been written in the English language by a woman, and is an important work of Christian mysticism. It is the source of the phrase "and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" which was included in the poem "Little Gidding" by T. S. Eliot.

Answer: Johann Georg Zimmerman

After losing both his parents at a young age, Zimmerman (1728-1795) settled on the profession of medicine, but included a wide range of other subjects in his studies. He spent the early part of his career practicing in the small Swiss town of Brug, where his reluctance to engage in social activities gave him plenty of time for solitary contemplation.

It was at this time that he started compiling his essays on the value of using solitude for constructive thought which he published in 1808 as 'An Examination of the Advantages of Solitude'. Towards the end of his life, his hypochondria and depression overwhelmed him, and he retired from society completely, although he continued to write until his death.

Answer: Henry David Thoreau

'Walden; or, Life in the Woods' was written between 1845 and 1847, while Thoreau was living in a cabin on the property of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the fringe of the town of Concord, Massachusetts. In keeping with the transcendentalist belief that the self-reliant individual is inherently good, he tried to immerse himself in nature so as to gain insight into the ways in which society corrupts both nature and the individual.

This was not a period of navel-gazing - there was a lot of work needed to build and maintain his shelter, and provide food, as well as writing, which occupied much of his time.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson spent almost her entire life in the town of Amherst, leaving it for ten months at nearby Mt Holyoke (1847-1848) and again in 1855 for a visit to Washington DC and Philadelphia which lasted several weeks. Following that trip, Emily took on herself the task of nursing her bedridden mother, and found the resulting isolated lifestyle much to her taste.

It was during this period that she organised all her previous writings, along with those she continued to produce, into forty notebooks which were discovered and published after her death.

She became increasingly reclusive, eventually not even opening the door to talk to visitors, but conversing through it, and was seen by virtually nobody outside her immediate family during the last fifteen years of her life.

Answer: Marcel Proust

Despite the intensive writing of his final years, Proust did not finish all the rewriting for his masterpiece. The final three volumes were revised by his brother, and published posthumously. The first six volumes were translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff as 'Remembrance of Things Past'; Moncrieff died before completing the translation, which was done by others. Later revisions of the translation changed the title to the more literal 'In Search of Lost Time'.

As well as its length, the novel is known for its exploration of the concept of involuntary memory, and for its handling of ideas related to homosexuality.

Answer: J D Salinger

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) was best known for his novel of teen angst, 'Catcher in the Rye', but that title would have made the question too easy. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" was not Salinger's first published work, but it was the one that established him as a significant 20th century American author. The first of his stories to feature the Glass family (others include 'Franny and Zooey' and 'Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters'), it relates a day spent at the beach by Seymour Glass while his wife stays in their hotel room talking to her mother on the phone, a day which ends in Seymour's suicide.

Salinger spent much of his life avoiding publicity, moving from New York City to the small New Hampshire town of Cornish in 1953. There he was initially sociable, but became increasingly withdrawn even from the town's activities. He died there of natural causes in 2010.

Answer: Harper Lee

Of course, Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird', published in 1960, won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and is still widely read around the world. Many secondary schools include it in their curriculum as an excellent way to engage students in discussing the philosophical issues it raises.

This was Harper Lee's only published full-length work until the release of 'Go Set a Watchman' in 2015. She did start a second novel tentatively titled 'The Long Goodbye' and a non-fiction study of a serial murderer, but neither had been published before her death.

She published a few essays, and granted a very few interviews, but basically remained true to the philosophy she expressed when invited to address the audience while she was being granted an award in 2007: "Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool."

Answer: Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon's work is characterised by its complexity, incorporating aspects of his studies in science, mathematics and history into their structures. 'The Crying of Lot 49', first published in 1966, is one of his shortest works, and is often classed as a novella. A post-modern work of fiction (or possibly a parody of post-modernism), it follows the efforts of Oedipa Maas to sort out a possible historical mystery involving two postal services and some stamps that may prove the existence of the underground one. It ends at an auction, where lot 49 on the day's list of items to be sold is a postage stamp that may or may not be the object of her search.

Thomas Pynchon was described as a recluse living in Mexico in a review of his first book, 'V.', in 1963. While he has avoided interviews and involvement in the mass media, there is nothing to suggest that he has not been leading a perfectly normal low-profile life as he continues to write prolifically. He played himself in an episode of the animated TV show 'The Simpsons', where he responds to the request to provide a blurb for Marge's book by saying "Here's your quote: Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!"