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Updated: July 14, 2025
The individual who is ruled by his obsessions not only paves the way for needless and ultimate breakdown, but is in danger of gradually narrowing his field of usefulness and pleasure until he is in little better case than Simeon Stylites, who spent nearly half a century on the top of a monument.
"This is a strange way of showing it," said the doctor, looking round him with a comical expression, "to deprive me of my companion, and leave me as lonely as Simon Stylites on the top of his pillar." Mrs. Linwood and Edith, who had seen our entrance, came forward and congratulated me on my convalescence.
Each is a Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards, Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They never approach normal life.
Jerome in the wilderness, or Stylites on his pillar, were not more lonely than many a poor recluse in our city of two million inhabitants. And we ourselves would have been infinitely more at ease had we been called upon to bivouac beyond the sight of human habitation. Up one street and down another we passed, till we were wearied almost beyond endurance, and really uneasy for our cattle.
This singular chamber had probably been, in the early ages of Christianity, the cell of an anchorite, perhaps a disciple of Simeon Stylites, whose name was derived from his habitation, which, I believe, we have generally translated as meaning a column, but which was more probably a stele like this.
In some respects this monastic pietism resembled the pharisaism of Saul, in the schools of Tarsus, a technical, rigid, and painful adherence to rules, fastings, obtrusive prayers, and petty ritualisms, which form the essence and substance of all pharisaism and all monastic life; based on the enormous error that man deserves heaven by external practices, in which, however, he can never perfect himself, though he were to live, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a pillar for twenty years without once descending; an eternal unrest, because perfection cannot be attained; the most terrible slavery to which a man can be conscientiously doomed, verging into hypocrisy and fanaticism.
Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being built over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human intervals and in a human proportion. I am not one desiring deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stay in it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that every Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column.
There, Simeon Stylites now had patience certainly, great patience; for thirty years he stood on a pillar!
At intervals there arose, under the shade of a mimosa, the white cupola of a tomb; sometimes a nude child stood motionless on the edge of the water in the attitude of unconscious reverie, not even turning his head to see the train fly along. This deep gravity in childhood is peculiar to the East. What could that boy, standing on his lump of earth as a Stylites on his pillar, be thinking of?
Her visiting list was so small that she did not keep a social secretary, but, it was said, wrote her invitations herself. Stylites on his pillar was less exclusive. Nor did he take his exalted but lonely position with less sense of humor.
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