The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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A thousand poets sing of solitude—“let me live, unseen, unknown,” yearned Alexander Pope—but far
more people curse it. The difference between bliss and distress generally seems to be whether solitude is
chosen or involuntary. Forced isolation is one of the oldest known punishments. Banishment was widely
used during the Roman Empire (the poet Ovid was exiled from Rome in A.D. 8, possibly for writing
obscene verse), and for centuries a severe penalty on the high seas was marooning, in which an offending
sailor was deposited on an uninhabited island, sometimes with a Bible and a bottle of rum. Most such men
were never heard from again. Even now, when a Jehovah’s Witness is disfellowshipped for breaking church
doctrine, every member of the religion is forbidden from speaking to the sinner.
The worst nonlethal punishment in the United States penal system is solitary confinement. It’s a “hell all
to yourself,” said Robert Stark, who has spent years in solitary at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, serving
time for murder. Thomas Silverstein killed a prison guard in 1983 and since then (except for one week
during a prison riot) has been locked alone in a concrete and steel box, during which he has never once felt
an affectionate touch. It feels as if he’s been “buried alive,” Silverstein wrote, “for an entire lifetime.”
Todd Ashker, who was isolated in a windowless supermax cell for about twenty-five years, described his
situation as “a continuous silent screaming.” John Catanzarite spent nearly fourteen years in solitary in a
California prison and said that when he started to lose his sanity he was glad, because it might release him
from the horror of reality.
After ten days in solitary confinement, many prisoners display clear signs of mental harm, and one study
showed that about a third will eventually develop active psychosis. There are at least eighty thousand such
inmates in America. The United Nations has determined that holding a person in isolation for more than
fifteen days is cruel and inhuman punishment.
“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in
Vietnam, two of them alone, before he became a U.S. senator. “It crushes your spirit,” McCain added.
“The onset of despair is immediate.” A large majority of men, and twenty-five percent of women, a
University of Virginia study found, would rather subject themselves to mild electric shocks than do nothing
but sit quietly with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. Unless you are a trained meditator, the study’s authors
concluded, the “mind does not like to be alone with itself.” Terry Anderson, kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985
and held mostly alone for more than six years, said, “I would rather have had the worst companion than no
companion at all.”
Many evolutionary biologists believe that early humans thrived, despite being weaker and slower than