The Stranger in the
Woods
The Last True Hermit
By Michael Finkel
March 2017
About the author
I learned about
Christopher Knight while scanning the news on my phone one morning. The
story grabbed me. I've slept hundreds of nights in the wild, though not
one permitting much quiet time in the forest. I wasn't jealous of
Knight's feat - the non-campfire rule is too brutal - but I did feel some
degree of respect and a great deal of astonishment.
I like being
alone. My preferred exercise is solo long-distance running. When
life becomes overwhelming, my first thought - my fantasy - is to head for the
woods. My house is a testament to runaway consumerism, but what I crave
most is simplicity and freedom. Once, when my kids were all in diapers
and the chaos and sleeplessness had turned poisonous, I did quit the world,
albeit briefly and formally. I fled to India and enrolled in a ten-day
silent retreat, hoping that a large dose of alone time would settle my nerves.
It didn't. The
retreat was secular, though heavy on meditation, and I found it grueling.
It was more monastic than eremitic, with hundreds of other attendees, but we
were not allowed to talk or gesture or make eye contact. The desire to
socialize never left me, and simply sitting still was a physical
struggle. Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering
over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared,
diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.
I didn't dare -
scrutinizing oneself that candidly seemed to require bravery and fortitude I
didn't possess. But I never stopped thinking about what might reside down
there, what insights, what truth. There were people at the retreat in
India who had completed months of silence withdrawal, and the calmness and
placidity they radiated made me envious. Knight had seemingly surpassed
all boundaries, plunging to the bottom of the well, to the mysterious
deep.
**********
How many things there
are that I don't want -- Socrates, Circa 425 B.C.
Our genus, Homo, arose
two and a half million years ago, and for more than 99% of human existence, we
all live like hermits -- in small bands of nomadic huntergatherers.
Though the groups may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone spent
significant parts of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a
few others. This is who we truly are.
The agricultural
revolution began 12 thousand years ago, and the planet was swiftly reorganized
into villages and cities and nations, and soon the average person spent
virtually no time alone at all. To a thin but steady stream of people,
this was unacceptable. So, they escaped. Recorded history extends
back 5 thousand years, and for as long as humans have been writing, we have
been writing about hermits. It's a primal fascination. People have
sought out solitary existence at all times across all cultures, some revered
and some despised.
There's a sea of names
for hermits -- recluses, monks, misanthropes, ascetics, anchorites, swamis --
yet no solid definitions or qualification standards, except the desire to be
primarily alone. You can take all the hermits in history and divide them
into 3 general groups to explain why they hid: Protesters, Pilgrims, Pursuers.
Protesters are hermits
whose primary reason for leaving is hatred of what the world has become.
Some cite wars as their motive, or environmental destruction, or crime or
consumerism or poverty or wealth. These hermits often wonder how the rest
of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we're doing to ourselves.
Pilgrims -- religious
hermits -- are by far the largest group. The connection between seclusion
and spiritual awakening is profound. In Hindu philosophy, everyone
ideally matures into a hermit. Becoming a sadhu, renouncing all familial
and material attachments and turning to ritual worship, is the 4th and final
stage of life.
Pursuers are the most
modern type of hermits. Rather than fleeing society, like Protesters, or
living beholden to higher power, like Pilgrims, Pursuers seek alone time for
artistic freedom, scientific insight, or deeper self-understanding.
Thoreau went to Walden to journey within, to explore "the private sea, the
Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being."
The first great literary
work about solitude was written in ancient China. The book describes the
pleasures of forsaking society and living in harmony with the seasons. It
says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction
rather than action, that we acquire wisdom. "Those with less become
content; those with more become confused."
All profound things are
preceded and attended by Silence. No real excellence, personal or social,
artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without
solitude. Solitude is the school of genius. Not till we have lost
the world do we begin to find ourselves.
It's possible that
Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded
by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending many
hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable,
but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees
was indolent; cutting them was enterprising. What did Knight do for
living? He lived for a living.
Maybe the operative
question wasn't why some would leave society but why anyone would want to
stay. The whole world is rushing headlong like a swelling torrent,
wouldn't you be better off following those who flee the world altogether?
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
For Knight, the
quintessence of serenity was a late-summer heat wave in midweek. Deep in
the night, he'd leave his camp and walk until the trees abruptly ended and the
waters of the pond swayed before him. He'd drop his clothes and slip into
the water. "I'd stretch out in the water," he said, "and
lie flat on my back, and look at the stars."
Knight shared only brief
details about his time in the woods, but what he did reveal was
harrowing. Some years he barely survived the winter. In one letter,
he said that to get through difficult times, he tried meditating. "I
didn't meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death
was near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too
long." Meditation worked.
When Knight faced
life-threatening challenges in the forest, he chose not to express
emotion. At no point did he pray to a higher power. With one
exception. When the worst of a Maine winter struck, all rules were
suspended. "Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don't
think. That's when you do have religion. You do pray. You
pray for warmth.
Suffering is such a deep
part of living. If we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding life
entirely. Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with
suffering. Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
What happened to him in the woods, Knight claimed, was inexplicable. "It's complicated," he said. "Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here is the tricky thing: I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant."
The dividing line
between himself and the forest seemed to dissolve. His isolation felt
more like a communion. "My desires dropped away. I didn't long
for anything. I didn't even have a name. To put it romantically, I
was completely free."
When you're alone, your awareness of time and boundaries grows fuzzy. All distances, all measures change for the person who becomes solitary. In solitude, one empties completely the small house of one's soul. The true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.
The past, the land of wistfulness, and the future, the place of yearning, seemed to evaporate. Knight simply existed in the perpetual now. He does not care if people fail to understand what he did in the woods. He did not do it for us to understand. He wasn't trying to prove a point. There was no point. You're just there, you are.
There was nothing
greater than to stand alone, bare-headed under the sun, in the presence of the
earth and air, in the presence of the immense forces of the universe -- Richard
Jefferies, British naturalist, 1887.
"I was never lonely," said Knight. He was attuned to the completeness of his own presence rather than to the absence of others. Conscious thought was sometimes replaced with a soothing internal humming. "Once you taste solitude, you don't grasp the idea of being alone," he said. "If you like solitude, you're never alone."
With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. Jail, he's realized, might not be all bad. There's routine and order in jail, and he's able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar to the one he'd preferred during winters in the woods. "I'm surrounded in here by less than desirable people," he says, "but at least I wasn't thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim."
He is unimpressed with what he's learned in jail of the society he is about to enter, and is certain he is not going to fit in. Everything moves at light speed, without rest. "It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia. The inappropriate choices of aspirations and goals."
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less we are able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagination. We live locked in our own head and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
Solitude is the most
profound fact of the human condition. Ultimately, and precisely in the
deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone.
Surprisingly, I receive
one final letter from Knight. It's an elegy to our relationship, five
lines long. He instructed me to purchase some flowers for my wife, and
candy for the cowboys, "for compensation of your absence to
Maine." Then he tells me never to come back. "For now and
then hence." He didn't sign his name, of course, but for the first
time, he includes a small doodle, done with colored pencils. It's a
flower, just a single flower, a daisy with red petals and a yellow center and
two green leaves, blooming at the bottom of his note. An unmistakably
optimistic sign. I take it as a signal that he's adapted to his new life.
I take it as a sign of hope.
