There’s something fascinating about the life of a hermit: the hut, the foraging, the personal legion of domesticated forest creatures . just thinking about it makes me long for that gilded copy of Walden I used to skim on weekends at Powell Symphony Hall. There, ushering on the Grand Tier, in a decadent nest of red velvet and gold leaf, I would fantasize about stopping time. I would read about Walden in winter and dream of hours of introspection, tying things together and figuring out Truth or myself-or both.

As August rolled in to St. Louis, I rolled out on an jet, bound for Heidelberg. I couldn’t wait to wade through centuries of culture; to clamber into the Alps; to try out my German skills and sample real chocolate.

But I also knew that I was running away from one culture, flying into the next. For better or worse, I was forsaking family, St. Louis and remnants of a great love. On the surface, I was leaving home to buff up on the German language. On the inside, I was hoping to straighten out the life I left behind.

The first half of this adventure was a rush of senses. Yet, after two weeks of music in Ireland and four of grammatical Inferno in Germany, it was time to unpack my head. I didn’t abandon human society-there’s no way I’d make it on acorns and squirrel meat-but instead of jumping into German life, I retreated into my own.

I began to write. I wrote on the bus, in class, in the womb-like silence of rushing trains. I wrote everything I noticed, everything that came into my head, until my hand cramped. I drifted through the streets in a lovely oasis of thought.

Then, cautiously, I stepped out of my head and into the thoughts of others. In the basement of the Anglistisches Seminar. I discovered the English language library. Here, underground, I played in an eddy of scholastic nostalgia. Shelves of poetry, prose, criticism, cultural history, civil rights, of media, intellectualism and imperialism-good God, it was a confectionery: trillions of thoughts on millions of pages of prose, lovely and ordered.

I was a reader, a mind among the static thoughts of other minds. I devoured everything I opened. For weeks, I sat in this subterranean smorgasbord, connecting Americanness, Englishness, Irishness and Germanness, putting pieces of myself together and linking it with the world outside.

I built mental landscapes and abstract empires. Then, halfway through an essay about nascent democracy’s impact on the Central European sense of humor, I had a wholly practical thought: I realized that a hermit’s isolation might also be her downfall. The recluse gets used to the dim light of the cave, the comfort of the archive, the easy come-and-go of ideas and the objectification of great personalities into words and pictures. When she spends too long in her own head, she forgets that there is a tangible world outside of it, a world that keeps moving while she overcomes the fourth dimension and skitters back and forth through time.

I have two months left. Part of me wants to push that boundary back, to stay in the sweet, ambiguous mist of youth and uncertainty, hoping that the clock doesn’t tick. But, eventually, the skies will clear, and there will be a path, and I’ll get on it and leave everything I am behind. For now, I’ll invoke a truism that a pair of wise Irishmen shared with me: We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time-so get on with living. But occasionally, I’ll look back and remember these lovely, stolen, gray moments, alone in my hermitage in Heidelberg-where I met myself, and where I realized that we leave not to join a new culture, but to get a better view of our own.

Sarah Hale is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences studying in Heidelberg, Germany this semester.