The first time I stayed in a monastic enclosure—a cloister, in effect, reserved for monks and a few guests—I took as my holy scripture The Kid Stays in the Picture, the raucous memoir by Bob Evans, the bon vivant Hollywood producer who married seven times. I’d found a copy of it in the monastery’s unofficial library—a rickety, hundred-year-old wooden house across from the official library—in which I also found collected stories by Woody Allen and the love-soaked fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Graham Greene.
A worker (10 or more of these live with the monks, helping with plumbing and generators) was doing pull-ups against a creaky beam; also in the “raunchy library,” as a monk had beamingly presented it to me, were a stationary bike and a “world class” 160-gram Frisbee. My room—St. Paul the Hermit—had a bed that almost collapsed under my negligible weight, down the corridor from a shared toilet whose seat slipped out from under me every time I tried to use it. The window in my cell was held together by cellophane and hope.
