The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

including Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Emily Brontë, and Vincent van Gogh. Herman Melville, the
author of Moby-Dick, largely withdrew from public life for thirty years. “All profound things,” he wrote,
“are preceded and attended by Silence.” Flannery O’Connor rarely left her rural farm in Georgia. Albert
Einstein referred to himself as a “loner in daily life.”
The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that “no real excellence, personal or social, artistic,
philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.” The historian Edward Gibbon said that
“solitude is the school of genius.” Plato, Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Kafka have all been described as
solitaries. “Not till we have lost the world,” wrote Thoreau, “do we begin to find ourselves.”
“Thoreau,” said Chris Knight, offering his appraisal of the great transcendentalist, “was a dilettante.”
Perhaps he was. Thoreau spent two years and two months, starting in 1845, at his cabin on Walden Pond
in Massachusetts. He socialized in the town of Concord. He often dined with his mother. “I had more
visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life,” he wrote. One dinner party at his
place numbered twenty guests.
While Knight lived in the woods, he didn’t think of himself as a hermit—he never put a label on who he
was—but when speaking of Thoreau, he used a particular phrase. Knight said that Thoreau was not a “true
hermit.”
Thoreau’s biggest sin may have been publishing Walden. Knight said that writing a book, packaging
one’s thoughts into a commodity, is not something a true hermit would do. Nor is hosting a party or
hobnobbing in town. These actions are directed outward, toward society. They all shout, in some way, “Here
I am!”
Yet almost every hermit communicates with the outside world. Following the Tao Te Ching, so many
protester hermits in China wrote poems—including poet-monks known as Cold Mountain, Pickup, Big
Shield, and Stonehouse—that the genre was given its own name, shan-shui.
Saint Anthony was one of the first Desert Fathers, and the inspiration for thousands of Christian hermits
who followed. Around A.D. 270, Anthony moved into an empty tomb in Egypt, where he stayed alone for
more than a decade. He then lived in an abandoned fort for twenty years more, subsisting only on bread,
salt, and water delivered by attendants, sleeping on the bare ground, never bathing, devoting his life to
intense and often agonizing piety.
According to his biographer, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, who met with him in person, Anthony
ended his retreat with a pure soul and would go to heaven. But for much of his time in the desert, the
biography adds, Anthony was inundated by parishioners seeking counsel. “The crowds,” Anthony said, “do
not permit me to be alone.”
Even the anchorites, locked up by themselves for life, were not separate from medieval society. Their
cells were often in town, and most had a window through which they counseled visitors. People realized that
speaking with a sympathetic anchorite could be more soothing than praying to a remote and unflinching
God. Anchorites gained widespread fame as sages, and for several centuries, much of the population of
Europe discussed great matters of life and death with hermits.
In the forest, Knight never snapped a photo, had no guests over for dinner, and did not write a sentence.
His back was fully turned to the world. None of the hermit categories fit him properly. There was no clear
why. Something he couldn’t quite feel had tugged him away from the world with the persistence of gravity.
He was one of the longest-enduring solitaries, and among the most fervent as well. Christopher Knight was