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What a terrible job to have: seven years of living in a shack, not talking to anyone, not allowed to wash yourself or cut your fingernails.

Fortunately it appears not all hermit employers were so draconian. This sounds like an interesting form of entertainment:

"You pull a bell, and gain admittance. The hermit is generally in a sitting posture, with a table before him, on which is a skull, the emblem of mortality, an hour-glass, a book and a pair of spectacles. The venerable bare-footed Father, whose name is Francis (if awake) always rises up at the approach of strangers. He seems about 90 years of age, yet has all his sense to admiration. He is tolerably conversant, and far from being unpolite."

I'm now hoping for a smartphone app called Hermit, which does exactly what is described above. The "tolerably conversant" 90-year-old sounds like a fun kind of AI to write. Compared to the stuff I do on a phone in idle moments, chatting with a simulated hermit while contemplating a memento mori desktop seems positively useful.

Indeed, that paragraph seems to describe every caretaker of every minor out-of-the-way historical landmark ever.
With mentioning Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(play)

Lots of hermit and general landscape architecture intrigue, and a character based on young Ada Lovelace.

...and a (deliberate) mistranslation of "et in Arcadia ego". I saw it when it opened in '93 and it made a big impression on me. Stoppard is the Stephenson of the stage.
I can't tell if this is meant to praise or insult Tom Stoppard.
Wow, no, it was meant as praise! He's sly, clever, witty... just what I like.

If you have seen the play, you'll see what I meant about the deliberate misuse of the phrase. Most people without a classical education misunderstand and misuse the phrase (and have for centuries) which Stopard slyly twisted for comic effect. (OK, it's snobbish, but really, any domain-intensive joke is snobbish to people who aren't fluent in the domain. You can make such a joke without mocking the people who don't get it.)

The point is to highlight in an amusing way the way memes mutate.

For example the book "The Ugly American" made a really important point about foreign aid, anticommunism etc...but people read the title and used the phrase completely backwards. OK, the new meaning also makes sense but completely misses the important point made by the book.

Or people who use the phrase "the third world" and don't realize it's a French Revolution reference. Which causes them to make useful retroformations like "the second world" which sound ontologically bizarre but actually perfectly sensible if you can forget where the term came from.

And speaking of "et in Arcadia ego"...well let's say that only the misunderstood interpretation adds an undercurrent of humor to HN story from yesterday (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-arcadia-i... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8707913 ).

Speaking of snobbishness and reverse snobbishness: liking puns about group theory, lambda calculus, or loop optimization doesn't preclude liking puns in dead languages about ancient philosophers. Or vice versa. The Two Cultures are alive and well but it doesn't mean anyone is compelled to live that way.

The "Third World" is a Cold War, not French Revolution reference. There may have been a use of the term in the context of the French Revolution, but the use that has evolved into a reference to less-developed countries mutated from a term for nonaligned countries in the Cold War which was detached from any similar term that may have been used in the context of the French Revolution.
Sorry dragonwriter, you make my point.

The term "Tiers Monde" was coined in an essay by Sauvy specifically making the analogy to the Tiers Etat (third estate) of pre-revolutionary France. The point being that the dispossessed majority rose up and overthrew their seemingly entrenched overlords, and that by analogy the disenfranchised poor of the world would rise up and overthrow the then global powers (USA & USSR) of the cold war.

Now academic revolutionary theory had already moved on by the time he wrote that (revolutions like the French or American are clearly the revolutions of the upper middle classes, and even the major communist revolutions of Russia and China were instigated and lead by upper middle class bourgeois who used the poor to help achieve their own ends). But the simplistic marxist view of class struggle was still popular in the press and much of the populace (and was still considered legit in academic settings too until the 90s).

Now as a kid/teenager during the cold war I spend part of my life in India (famously non-aligned; Nehru even foolishly turned down a seat at the security council to make this point) and France and the origins and implications of the term were important parts of how geopolitics was viewed. However in the States, all the context is stripped out rendering the analogy simplistic at best and ultimately not really formative (we already know that there are poor countries -- simply using a new name adds no value). In fact even today I look at my kid's high school american history textbook (stops and rummages in kid's backpack to confirm) and even in American history it seems most of the context has been stripped out. I guess it's too contentious, or perhaps controversial.