The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

by Michael Finkel

It wasn’t funny enough to be a joke, and it wasn’t serious enough to be a crime. It occupied some unsettling place between.

Fun line

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.

I never noticed anything odd about him, but who knows what was really going on? Us Mainers, we have our own way of doing things. We like to hold our peacoats and our family really close.”

All his life, he’d been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision. As he drove, perhaps he felt within himself some rumblings of fear and thrill, as if at the precipice of a radical leap.

He brooded about Lyme for a while, then came to a realization: “I couldn’t do anything about it, so I stopped thinking about it.”

He wasn’t sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom. It applied only to people who felt they had to be doing something all the time, which from what he’d observed was most people.

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. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.”

“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.”

Everyone dreams of dropping out of the world once in a while. Then you get in the car and drive back home.

“They don’t approve of what I did, but I am still part of the family. I am grateful.”

You have the ability to do harm or good. Do what you think is right.”

“I’ll speak to you when the lilacs bloom. And maybe not even then.”

His voice catches and his Stoicism crumbles, and the humanity beneath pushes out, and I glance at his face and see tears sliding down his cheeks.

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 are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets.