The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

Knight’s camp. He began observing the mushroom when its cap was no bigger than a watch face. It grew
unhurriedly, wearing a Santa’s hat of snow all winter, and eventually, after decades, expanded to the size of a
dinner plate, striated with black and gray bands.
The mushroom meant something to him; one of the few concerns Knight had after his arrest was that the
police officers who’d tromped through his camp had knocked it down. When he learned that the mushroom
was still there, he was pleased.
Even in the warm months, Knight rarely left his camp during the daytime. The chief exception to this
came at the tail end of each summer, as the cabin owners were departing and the mosquitoes died down,
when Knight embarked on a brief hiking season. There were a couple of aesthetically pleasing groves he
liked to visit, natural Zen gardens, one with a ghostly scatter of white birches with their paperlike bark,
another with a breeze-triggered huddle of quaking aspens. He passed some time at a few sandbanks along
the shore of North Pond that felt to him like tiny beaches. “Sometimes I’d stay up late,” he said, “and listen
to some crazy AM talk-radio show, and hike to a high clearing before dawn and watch the ground fog collect
in the valley.”
Fall foliage is undeniably beautiful, as easy to like as chocolate, but Knight felt that the woods were at
their loveliest when the leaves were finished. He liked the skeletal look of bare branches. “I’ve read too
much Victorian literature—old books, used, the ones with bookplates in them, and the plates always show
bare-limbed trees, to convey a sense of loss or coming horror.”
He never celebrated his birthday, or Christmas, or any human holiday; he was usually unaware of the
exact date, unless he heard it on the radio. He periodically witnessed the northern lights, flowing in pinks
and greens like billowing drapes hanging from the sky, and if a lunar eclipse was mentioned on the news, he
walked to an open meadow and watched it. He could sense, by the flow of darkness and day, when the
winter and summer solstices had arrived, as well as the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, though he marked
the occasions with no special festivity. “I didn’t sing, I didn’t dance, I didn’t make sacrifices.”
Knight had a particular fondness for the days around the Fourth of July. He did not watch fireworks but
instead enjoyed his own private show. “It was the peak of firefly season. I thought that was poetically
appropriate. I suspect John Adams would approve. Wasn’t it he who recommended fireworks on the Fourth
of July?”
It seemed that Knight could immediately recall anything he had ever read or seen, though he insisted that
he did not have a photographic memory. He just remembered it all. “Both Adams and Jefferson died on the
Fourth of July in 1826,” he added. He wondered if modern society, with its flood of information and
tempest of noise, was only making us dumber. “I was not overwhelmed with data,” he said. “I had a rather
restricted diet, literally and figuratively.” The internet, wrote Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, his book
about brain science and screen time, steadily chips away at one’s “capacity for concentration and
contemplation.”
According to more than a dozen studies conducted around the world, Knight’s camp—an oasis of natural
quiet—may have been the ideal setting to encourage maximal brain function. These studies, examining the
difference between living in a calm place and existing amid commotion, all arrived at the same conclusion:
noise and distraction are toxic.
The chief problem with environmental noise one can’t control is that it’s impossible to ignore. The human
body is designed to react to it. Sound waves vibrate a tiny chain of bones—the hammer, anvil, and stirrup,
the old-time hardware store of the middle ear—and these physical vibrations are converted to electrical