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Gagné has been reading the works of the early Christian monks known as the “Desert Fathers.”

Although some version of the solitary exists in nearly every religious tradition, eremitism is most commonly associated with the early Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third and fourth centuries.

Look out on any desert landscape, from the Egyptian boulder-plains of the Desert Fathers to Ehrenreich’s relatively verdant Joshua Tree National Park.

For the Desert Fathers of third-century Egypt, Christianity’s founding monastics, the desert was not merely a place for undistracted prayer or a sanctuary from persecution; as the realm of the Devil, it was a spiritual battleground.

I discovered acedia spread from the Desert Fathers into the monasteries of medieval Europe, where it was seen as a sin that monks needed to overcome.