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

by Michael Finkel

For long stretches, family didn’t exist in his thoughts.

“The more you realize, the more you realize there is nothing to realize,” she said. “The idea that there’s somewhere we have got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion.”

The great computer Deep Thought, in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, worked on the problem for seven and a half million years, then revealed that the answer to life, the universe, and everything was the number forty-two.

Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.

We live locked in our own heads 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.