The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

It’s now just a spot in the woods. One or two more summers and it’ll probably be hard to tell that
someone lived here. I sit on a boulder, out of the snow, trying to catch a few blades of sunlight slashing
through the branches. Still, I shiver. It feels a little lonely here.
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.
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” wrote the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate
Octavio Paz. “Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably
alone,” wrote the Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Surprisingly, I receive one final letter from Knight. It’s an elegy to our relationship, five lines long. He
instructs me to purchase some flowers for my wife, and candy for the cowboys, “for compensation of your
absence to Maine.” Then he tells me never to come back. “For now and then hence.”
He doesn’t sign his name, of course, but for the first time, he includes a small doodle, done with colored
pencils. It’s a flower, just a single flower, a daisy with red petals and a yellow center and two green leaves,
blooming at the bottom of his note. An unmistakably optimistic sign. I take it as a signal that he’s adapted at
least somewhat to his new life. I take it to mean that even if he can never live the way he wishes to, he won’t
be walking with the Lady of the Woods. I take it as a sign of hope.
Sometimes, though, I can’t help but wonder, What if? What if Sergeant Hughes hadn’t been so dedicated,
and Knight had never been caught? Knight told me that he planned to stay out there forever. He was willing
to die in his camp, the spot where he was most content. Even without a cleanup crew, it would not take too
long for nature to reclaim the area, ferns sprouting, roots creeping through, his tent and his body and
eventually his propane cylinders consumed by the soil.
It’s the ending, I believe, that Knight planned. He wasn’t going to leave behind a single recorded thought,
not a photo, not an idea. No person would know of his experience. Nothing would ever be written about
him. He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice. His end wouldn’t create so
much as a ripple on North Pond. It would have been an existence, a life, of utter perfection.