The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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Knight was sensitive about being thought of as insane. “The idea of crazy has been attached to me,” he
acknowledged. “I understand I’ve made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label ‘crazy’ bothers me. Annoys
me. Because it prevents response.” When someone asks if you’re crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say
yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you
really are crazy. There’s no good answer.
If anything, Knight thought of himself, in the grand tradition of Stoicism, as the opposite of crazy—as
entirely clearheaded and rational. When he learned that the bundles of magazines buried at his site were
regarded by some locals as an eccentric habit, he was infuriated. Everything he did in the woods, he said,
had a reason. “People don’t comprehend the reasons. They only see craziness and absurdness. I had a
strategy, a long-term plan. They don’t comprehend because I’m not there to explain it.” Those bundles were
a sensible recycling of reading material into floorboards.
It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea
that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money,
was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was
indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.
Knight insisted that his escape should not be interpreted as a critique of modern life. “I wasn’t consciously
judging society or myself. I just chose a different path.” Yet he’d seen enough of the world from his perch
in the trees to be repulsed by the quantity of stuff people bought while the planet was casually poisoned,
everyone hypnotized into apathy by “a bunch of candy-colored fluff” on a billion and one little screens.
Knight observed modern life and recoiled from its banality.
Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see “the unfathomable stupidity of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche
wrote, “Wherever is the crowd is a common denominator of stench.” Knight’s best friend, Thoreau, believed
that all societies, no matter how well intentioned, pervert their citizens. Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”
Maybe the operative question, Knight implied, wasn’t why someone would leave society but why anyone
would want to stay. “The whole world is rushing headlong like a swelling torrent,” a recluse once told
Confucius. “Wouldn’t you be better off following those who flee the world altogether?” The Indian writer
Jiddu Krishnamurti has been quoted as saying, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a
profoundly sick society.”
The Hermitary website, a digital storehouse of everything hermit-related, posted a series of essays by a
modern solitude seeker—he described himself as a homeless wanderer—who used only the initial S. as a