The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

“psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my
purpose in life.”
When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that
she was unable to fully express. “While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge,” she said. “You are
your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the
cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying.” A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an
overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three. “It was a risk that
came with this experiment, to become half crazy,” she’d reportedly said on a radio show two days earlier.
The first solo around-the-world sailing race, the Golden Globe, began in 1968. Bernard Moitessier of
France was on his way to winning when he realized that he loved being alone on his boat and dreaded
returning to the hubbub of society. He quit the race after seven months and continued sailing for nearly a
complete second lap of the world, achieving a personal victory he found far more meaningful than any
contest. “I am free, free as never before,” he wrote.
But another competitor in the Golden Globe, Donald Crowhurst of Great Britain, became increasingly
lonely and depressed, began radioing false reports about his progress, and finally retreated to his cabin,
where he composed a lengthy and hallucinatory treatise. Then he went overboard. His body was never
recovered. “It is finished. It is finished. It is the mercy” were some of his final written words.
The same solitude, that of the enormous emptiness of the ocean, moved Moitessier to ecstasy and drove
Crowhurst to insanity. Knight had within him, it seemed, a little of both sailors—a dark side and a light, a
yin of winter and a yang of summer. “Pain and pleasure,” he called it. Both were essential, he believed, and
one could not exist without the other. “Suffering is such a deep part of living,” wrote Robert Kull, who lived
alone on an island in Patagonia for a year, in 2001, “that if we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding
life entirely.” The Tao Te Ching says that “happiness rests in misery.”
“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering,” wrote Dostoyevsky in Notes
from the Underground. “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.”
Jill Hooley, the Harvard psychology professor who felt that Knight’s behavior displayed characteristics of
schizoid personality disorder, observed that torment was the price Knight paid in order to remain in the
woods. He was afflicted by cold and hunger, by fear during each break-in, by the guilt of knowing that what
he was doing was wrong. His very existence was threatened throughout the winter. “It’s an incredibly steep
price to pay,” said Hooley, “but he was clearly willing to pay it.” However acute, his distress was preferable
to the alternative: returning to society. Therefore, Hooley concluded, Knight must have received some
tremendous benefit for himself, psychologically, from being separated from the world.
Many of Knight’s most cherished and intense experiences in the woods, he said, were close to his most
horrific. In the dead of winter, there was not a rustling leaf, not a candle flick of wind, not a bug or bird.
The forest was locked in arctic silence. This was what he craved.
“What I miss most in the woods,” Knight said, “is somewhere in between quiet and solitude. What I miss
most is stillness.” To reach this pristine state, the forest hard-frozen and the animals bunkered, he had to
bring himself to the brink of death.
It was only when he heard the song of the chickadees, the state bird of Maine, that he knew winter would
soon loosen its grip, “that the end was near.” The feeling, he said, was momentous; he referred to it as a
celebration, the chirps volleying through the trees, the little birds with their black-capped heads bobbing in
the bare branches, calling their own names—chick-a-dee-dee—the sound of months of mute suffering