hen you are a hermit living alone in the Italian Alps, you monitor the weather. Snow means you can’t get groceries for a week. Rain will nourish the vegetable garden but also erode the hillside and send water into every crack in the roof.
When the thunderstorms roll in, you get off the trail to avoid the lightning. On a cold morning in May 2024, Johannes Schwarz stood on the narrow balcony of his hut, registering the clouds that filled the sky like cotton wool. It had rained all week and showed no sign of ceasing.
Schwarz was a towering figure. He wore a beard down to his chest and a black fleece that covered the top half of his priestly robe. In Schwarz’s previous life, the weather was an app on his phone that didn’t impact his daily life beyond telling him to grab an umbrella.
Now it was a series of constantly changing realities that put him in touch with something that felt pure and elemental. The rain meant he would have to write inside all day and make do with the groceries he already had: For dinner he would pull apples and flour out of the storage room to make a tart. For the past eight years, Schwarz, an Austrian priest of the Archdiocese of Vaduz in Liechtenstein, has spent part of the year in a hermitage on Monte Viso, a mountain wedged in the southwestern Italian Alps near the French border.
Schwarz had come to live at the altitude of 3,900 feet to access a world removed from the clutter of daily life and parish responsibilities, one where he could pursue clo.
