The Hermit-Burglar and the Optimistic Journalist
This content was originally published by JOSH TYRANGIEL on 21 April 2017 | 12:00 pm.
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At the jail, Finkel optimistically registers as a friend of the prisoner. He may as well be a torturer registering as a masseuse. Knight scowls through the partition glass at a point somewhere over the author’s shoulder, refusing eye contact or acknowledgment. “Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me,” Finkel writes a little despondently. But what the hermit lacks in warmth he makes up for in self-awareness.
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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
Knight: “Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home.”
Finkel: “Your hermit home — like under a bridge?”
Knight, after a Gene Wilder-worthy comedic pause: “You’re thinking of a troll.”
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Finkel shrewdly plays the punching bag while Knight alternates between jabs and details. We learn that the hermit had never spent a night in a tent before his abrupt departure from society at age 20, and that much of his survival depended on a miraculously hidden campsite. Tucked behind a tangle of brush and wind-breaking boulders, he spent decades just three minutes from the nearest cabin: “Towns and roads and houses surround his site; he could overhear canoeists’ conversations on North Pond. He wasn’t so much removed from humanity as sitting on the sidelines.” Finkel camped at the site and tells Knight he was enchanted by its tranquillity, to which the hermit responds: “Do you think I was engaging in feng shui?”
Once settled in, Knight treated the mostly empty vacation homes around him, as Finkel puts it, like his “own private Costco.” He slept under a camouflage canopy on a twin-size mattress with fitted sheets and Tommy Hilfiger pillowcases. There was Purell by the portable cooler. Wildlife was abundant, but he preferred peanut butter, frozen burgers and, above all, sweets. In a survey of the damage to nearby cupboards and psyches, Finkel notes, “One kid lost all his Halloween candy; the Pine Tree Camp was short an industrial-sized tub of fudge.”
Knight also stole epic quantities of books, and he roars to life through his taste. He quotes Freud, Marx and Woody Allen, and recognizes himself in the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground.” His fetish for stillness results in a fondness for Emily Dickinson. He hates Thoreau (“a dilettante”) and fans of Kerouac, and may be the first person to have followed through on a threat to use John Grisham novels as toilet paper. Through culture and his opinions of it, Knight stayed in touch with the world and categorized it, without the vulnerability of human engagement. He was the Holden Caulfield of the woods.
Which is not to say he lacked perspective. Knight swears he suffered no childhood trauma. His family, which never reported him missing, was flinty, self-reliant and “obsessed with privacy.” (“They assumed I was off doing something on my own.”) He didn’t choose to become a hermit — he was born one, and the woods gave him exactly what he sought. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable, I can’t dismiss that idea,” Knight says. “Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: When I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for.…To put it romantically, I was completely free.”
In one of their sweeter exchanges, relayed in an epilogue on his reporting methods, Knight calls Finkel his Boswell and tells him he likes long books. Finkel admits that his will probably be short — and it should have been shorter. Only in the epilogue do we learn that author and subject had just nine one-hour prison meetings. It’s the kind of thing readers should know earlier, especially since the poverty of access leads to some bad decisions.
In a search for more motive and meaning than the hermit will provide, Finkel chats with psychologists who never met Knight, a seeming violation of psychiatry’s Goldwater Rule against diagnosing people from afar. There are also honkingly dull digressions into the spiritual meaning of becoming a hermit (“In Hindu philosophy, everyone ideally matures into a hermit”), some pseudoscience about solitude and brain function, and an unfortunate comparison with prisoners in solitary confinement, who hardly have the luxury of choosing their solitude.
All this seems like obvious padding, but to give Finkel the benefit of the doubt, it may simply be that his affinity for his amazing hermit got the best of him. He does a remarkable job persuading one of the world’s more recalcitrant individuals to open up, but Finkel wants more, and it’s strange that he doesn’t recognize Knight’s limitations. At one of their last meetings, when a wall no longer separates them, the journalist asks the hermit to shake hands. “I’d rather not,” Knight replies.
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