A princess once told me about a friend of hers who had been an officer high in the Russian Army and a popular member of the Russian aristocracy. After the Bolshevik Revolution he escaped to Greece, renounced the world, and made his home in Mount Athos. There, in the hermit settlement perched on the windswept cliff-face of Karoulia, he occupies a kind of half-cave, half-hut, perched high above the sea and reached by perilously steep unprotected steps. He slept on the floor with his head on a stone pillow and with the bony skulls of former monkish inhabitants of the cell lined up on a shelf. Father Nikon, as he is called, is one of the very few educated and mannered men to be found in the peasant-stock illiterate community of Mount Athos. In a message he sent the Princess after many years of this solitary existence and in response to her enquiry, he said that he had found great peace and had never before known such happiness. The visitor who carried the message was struck by the contentment which radiated from him and the serene self-mastery with which he bore himself.
-- Notebooks Category 3: Relax and Retreat > Chapter 5 : Solitude > # 103
