As Roland Barthes has remarked, this condition allowed the monks to live together but apart, with each being able to preserve, as he put it, their own ‘idiorrhythmy’ (from the Greek idios, particular and rhythmos, rhythm, rule).17 In this condition they would be both isolated from and in contact with one another, in idiorrhythmic clusters. Within the clusters, living together did not wholly impinge on the possibility of being alone. Barthes was fascinated by this way of living, and noted that precisely this form of monasticism was the seedbed for what would later become a fundamental typology of the modern world: the single cell or single room. For Barthes the single cell is the quintessential representation of interiority: it is here that the single body finds its proper space, the space in which it can take care of itself.