The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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But why? Why would a twenty-year-old kid with a job and a car and a brain abruptly abandon the world?
The act had elements of a suicide, except he didn’t kill himself. “To the rest of the world, I ceased to exist,”
said Knight. His family must have suffered; they had no idea what had happened to him, and couldn’t
completely accept that he was dead. When his father died, fifteen years after the disappearance, Knight was
still listed as a survivor in the obituary.
His final moment as a member of society—“I just tossed the keys on the center console”—seem
particularly strange. Knight was raised with a keen appreciation for the value of money, and the Brat was the
most expensive item he’d ever purchased. The car was less than a year old, and he threw it away. Why not
hold on to the keys as a safety net? What if he didn’t like camping out?
“The car was of no use to me. It had just about zero gas and was miles and miles from any gas station.”
As far as anyone knows, the Brat is still there, half-swallowed by the forest, a set of keys somewhere within,
by this point as much a part of the wilderness as a product of civilization, perhaps like Knight himself.
Knight said that he didn’t really know why he left. He’d given the question plenty of thought but had never
arrived at an answer. “It’s a mystery,” he declared. There was no specific cause he could name—no
childhood trauma, no sexual abuse. There wasn’t alcoholism in his home, or violence. He wasn’t trying to
hide anything, to cover a wrongdoing, to evade confusion about his sexuality.
Anyway, none of these burdens typically produces a hermit. There’s a sea of names for hermits—
recluses, monks, misanthropes, ascetics, anchorites, swamis—yet no solid definitions or qualification
standards, except the desire to be primarily alone. Some hermits have tolerated steady streams of visitors, or
lived in cities, or holed up in university laboratories. But you can take virtually all the hermits in history and
divide them into three general groups to explain why they hid: protesters, pilgrims, pursuers.
Protesters are hermits whose primary reason for leaving is hatred of what the world has become. Some
cite wars as their motive, or environmental destruction, or crime or consumerism or poverty or wealth.
These hermits often wonder how the rest of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we’re doing to
ourselves.
“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.”
Across much of Chinese history, it was customary to protest a corrupt emperor by leaving society and
moving into the mountainous interior of the country. People who withdrew often came from the upper