The Stranger in the Woods

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.

Sometimes, though, I can't help but wonder -- What if?  What if Sergeant Hughes hadn't been so dedicated, and Knight had never been caught?  Knight told me that he planned to stay out there forever.  He was willing to die in his camp, the spot where he was most content...  It's the ending, I believe, that Knight planned.  He wasn't going to leave behind a single recorded thought, not a photo, not an idea.  No person would know of his experience.  Nothing would ever be written about him.  He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice.  His end wouldn't create so much as a ripple on North Pond.  It would have been an experience, a life, of utter perfection.