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

by Michael Finkel

Studies of humans in the United States, Great Britain, Holland, and Canada have shown that after passing time in quiet, rural settings, subjects were calmer and more perceptive, less depressed and anxious, with improved cognition and a stronger memory. Time amid the silence of nature, in other words, makes you smarter.

In the absence of a deity, Knight seemed to have venerated Socrates. The philosopher, born in 469 B.C., was not himself a hermit but advocated the lifestyle. Socrates may have concluded that his most valuable possession was his leisure. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life” is a quote commonly attributed to him. He walked everywhere barefoot, and ate only the poorest quality meats. Nothing appeared to bother him. Socrates was sentenced to death, facilitated by a cup of hemlock tea, for impiety and heretical teaching. One becomes free, Socrates seems to have taught, not by fulfilling all desires but by eliminating desire.

He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending 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 down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see “the unfathomable stupidity of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Wherever is the crowd is a common denominator of stench.” Knight’s best friend, Thoreau, believed that all societies, no matter how well intentioned, pervert their citizens. Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.” Maybe the operative question, Knight implied, wasn’t why someone would leave society but why anyone would want to stay. “The whole world is rushing headlong like a swelling torrent,” a recluse once told Confucius. “Wouldn’t you be better off following those who flee the world altogether?” The Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti has been quoted as saying, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

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. 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 imagining. 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.