The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting
Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas
Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long
Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and
Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard
E. Byrd.
Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include
Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan
Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks.
Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint
Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with
Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih.
It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor
Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates,
comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and
Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.
The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable
resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermitonly
chat groups.
My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout
history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades
on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time.
Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.
And then there’s the story of the last survivor of an Amazon tribe. In 2007, after several failed attempts
to make peaceful contact with this man, who once fired an arrow into the chest of a rescue worker, the
Brazilian government provided him with a thirty-one-square-mile region of rain forest. The land is offlimits
to everyone except this man. He traps animals for food. He has been completely alone for about
twenty years. Now that Chris Knight resides in society, this man, whose name is unknown—as is the name
of his tribe and the language he speaks—may be the most isolated person in the world.