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

by Michael Finkel

“I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast.”

One of the benefits of being labeled a hermit is that it permits me strange behavior.”

“Not till we have lost the world,” wrote Thoreau, “do we begin to find ourselves.”

And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie,” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.”

One becomes free, Socrates seems to have taught, not by fulfilling all desires but by eliminating desire.

is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

hermits could be subversive to obedience and stability, and that it was better to keep such people in monasteries, subject to regulations and routine.

“I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all.”

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.”

In solitude, he said, he could ponder ideas that allowed him to “go higher than a god, deeper than prayer”;

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

He should immediately be released from jail and allowed back into the woods. He never harmed anyone.

He must perform the whole dog-and-pony show of his punishment.

life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts.

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.