The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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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.
A Note About the Author Michael Finkel is the author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, which was adapted into a 2015 motion picture. He has reported from more than fifty countries and written for National Geographic, GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in western Montana.
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Also by Michael Finkel True Story:
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Contents Cover Also by Michael Fink
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In memory of Eileen Myrna Baker Fin
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1 The trees are mostly skinny where
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2 Terry Hughes’s wife nudges him
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eyes, and trains the .357 square in
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down, hands still locked behind his
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truth. Anything else would be wasti
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“I took no medications and never
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Or them. Nobody knew. Because of th
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North Pond hermit, it turns out, wa
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7 I learned about Christopher Knigh
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8 A white envelope arrived in my ma
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against the rules of journalism. I
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9 Augusta, Maine, is picturesque bu
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East accent. I plowed awkwardly on.
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10 Knight lived in the same campsit
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Knight, matching him step for step.
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He’d spread a carpet over the mag
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It was the kind of total quiet that
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to the nature of the electromagneti
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something. Chris was smart and frie
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13 But why? Why would a twenty-year
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including Charles Darwin, Thomas Ed
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14 Knight actually did have a plan.
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the sorts of places where it’s ne
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their canoe has been borrowed and r
Page 61 and 62: 16 Knight lived in the dirt but was
Page 63 and 64: he was famished for words, he’d s
Page 65 and 66: Knight had a strong distaste for bi
Page 67 and 68: Knight’s camp. He began observing
Page 69 and 70: 18 The only book Knight didn’t st
Page 71 and 72: my winter toilet. Do my business. T
Page 73 and 74: pen name. “Human society has been
Page 75 and 76: do telethons? I hate Jerry Lewis.
Page 77 and 78: fed her, but with Knight she had no
Page 79 and 80: 21 A thousand poets sing of solitud
Page 81 and 82: “psychologically completely out o
Page 83 and 84: 22 Snow melted, flowers bloomed, in
Page 85 and 86: changes is where the brain is funct
Page 87 and 88: His thieving raids became considera
Page 89 and 90: to sing, with his food supplies nea
Page 91 and 92: inherited from her mother, and a co
Page 93 and 94: 25 A side door to the jail swings o
Page 95 and 96: Jail, he’s realized, might not be
Page 97 and 98: 26 Chris’s oldest brother, Daniel
Page 99 and 100: That note, thirty-four words long,
Page 101 and 102: the bright side. The sun will come
Page 103 and 104: 28 A mile down the road, I pull ove
Page 105 and 106: It’s now just a spot in the woods
Page 107 and 108: For insight into Knight: Matt Hongo
Page 109 and 110: Annette Schipf Chris Anderson David
Page 111: David and Louise Proulx, whose tiny
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The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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