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

by Michael Finkel

“I have become solitary,” wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men which is nourished only in betrayals and hatred.”

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

Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.