What could be more noble or pure than forsaking society and vanity for one’s art? Henry David Thoreau’s call in 1854 to “simplify, simplify” was a kind of recluse’s mantra, as well as an act of protest against the modern world that would serve as a future model for solitary artists, but as Kathryn Schulz argued in a Thoreau takedown in The New Yorker in 2015, reclusiveness can also breed narcissism and sententiousness. Today, it can feel a little adolescent. It’s hard to buy into Thoreau’s concept of self-reliance while knowing that his mother was doing his laundry. Reclusiveness can also appear to arrest people in time, rendering even the most brilliant high-mindedness eccentric and sad, the most famous example being the late J.D. Salinger, who was still railing against “the phonies” and writing to teenage girls from his New Hampshire farmhouse well into middle age, 20 or so years after he began his self-imposed exile in the 1950s. Thomas Bernhard’s neighbors in his Austrian village used to warn their children when they misbehaved that they would send “that weird recluse” after them.

Now that we have terms like social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia and drugs like Paxil, retiring to one’s bedchamber feels less Emily Dickinson, more hikikomori. It’s all too easy to believe the age of the artistic recluse is over, given that most artists now cultivate a cyclical relationship with the spotlight, intermittently stepping into and receding from it. It’s almost impossible for the artist not to engage with the public today, and so the standards of privacy have lowered. These days, using a painting of yourself as an album cover (Lorde) or limiting press interviews (Frank Ocean) seems to count as mystery.

But what has increased in the age of distraction is our concern for the necessary conditions in which art could flourish. No longer can the world be kept at bay with the closing of a door; Woolf’s room of her own is now wired for internet. To look at my shelves of favorite novels written in feverish solitude and think that they might never have come to pass is also to know there must be many more today that are simply not being written. And so the greater truths found in solitude — in nature, like the Romantics’ “thoughts of more deep seclusion,” or in a country in which you don’t speak the language, in which no one knows your name — have never felt more rare and hard-won. The hermit sits alone no longer; he has a Facebook page to update.