The Hermit is the ultimate subjectivist. If he could even be said to have a gender -- for the Hermit would prefer to be totally self-referential structure, not even really a body. Every time The Hermit's soul projected itself into a creature like a mollusk, or even something so forward-thinking (albeit perpetually ensconced as a way of making its living in this world) as a mushroom, it felt no sense of the rest of the universe's pain. And this was the real problem with being human, gendered, limited, in the first place: the limits weren't The Hermit's own. And so The Hermit established his own fanclub. He literally surrounded himself with people who would only approve of him. Conversations within this group of yes-people rarely went deeper than the sort of thing that can be found in television episodes: neither hearing nor listening to each other, as if read from a script. The idea of music escapes him, because to resonate with anything musical would require resonating with something outside of himself. The objective world, which cannot exist. The Hermit spends his entire life praising what he encounters that feels "real" -- and very little of the world feels real to him except for his sensations. The idea that literally everything could be equally "real" is preposterous to him. It might be said that The Hermit represents the fallen-ness of this asymmetrical universe, in which beings once united gradually diverge, and powerful ideals fade with time. But for me he represents something much more. He represents the eternal figure of the tyrant -- the kind of leader that thrives on dividing the world in order to conquer it; never to renew our faith in that world, the way one renews faith in a half-baked, half-botched loaf of bread.
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