The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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coming to a close, the sound of survival. If he still had some fat left on his body, he was proud. Most times, he did not. “After a bad winter,” Knight said, “all I could think was that I’m alive.”
22 Snow melted, flowers bloomed, insects droned, deer bred. Years passed, or minutes. “I lost grasp of time,” Knight said. “Years were meaningless. I measured time by the season and moon. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand.” Thunder cracked, ducks flew, squirrels gathered, snow fell. Knight said that he couldn’t accurately describe what it felt like to spend such an immense period of time alone. Silence does not translate into words. And he feared that if he tried a translation, he’d come across as a fool. “Or even worse, as spouting off phony wisdom or little koans.” Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude “that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.” What happened to him in the woods, Knight claimed, was inexplicable. But he agreed to set aside his fear of phony wisdom and koans and give it a try. “It’s complicated,” he said. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.” The dividing line between himself and the forest, Knight said, seemed to dissolve. His isolation felt more like a communion. “My desires dropped away. I didn’t long for anything. I didn’t even have a name. To put it romantically, I was completely free.” Virtually everyone who has written about deep solitude has said some version of the same thing. When you’re alone, your awareness of time and boundaries grows fuzzy. “All distances, all measures,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, “change for the person who becomes solitary.” These sensations have been described by the ascetics of early Christianity, by Buddhist monks, by transcendentalists and shamans, by Russian startsy and Japanese hijiri, by solo adventurers, by Native Americans and Inuits reporting on vision quests. “I become a transparent eyeball,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature.” “I am nothing; I see all.” Lord Byron called it “the feeling infinite”; Jack Kerouac, in Desolation Angels, “the one mind of infinity.” The French Catholic priest Charles de Foucauld, who spent fifteen years living in the Sahara Desert, said that in solitude “one empties completely the small house of one’s soul.” Merton wrote that “the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.” This loss of self was precisely what Knight experienced in the forest. In public, one always wears a social mask, a presentation to the world. Even when you’re alone and look in a mirror, you’re acting, which is one reason Knight never kept a mirror in his camp. He let go of all artifice; he became no one and everyone. The past, the land of wistfulness, and the future, the place of yearning, seemed to evaporate. Knight
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Also by Michael Finkel True Story:
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Contents Cover Also by Michael Fink
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In memory of Eileen Myrna Baker Fin
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1 The trees are mostly skinny where
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2 Terry Hughes’s wife nudges him
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eyes, and trains the .357 square in
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down, hands still locked behind his
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truth. Anything else would be wasti
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“I took no medications and never
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Or them. Nobody knew. Because of th
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North Pond hermit, it turns out, wa
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7 I learned about Christopher Knigh
Page 31 and 32: 8 A white envelope arrived in my ma
Page 33 and 34: against the rules of journalism. I
Page 35 and 36: 9 Augusta, Maine, is picturesque bu
Page 37 and 38: East accent. I plowed awkwardly on.
Page 39 and 40: 10 Knight lived in the same campsit
Page 41 and 42: Knight, matching him step for step.
Page 43 and 44: He’d spread a carpet over the mag
Page 45 and 46: It was the kind of total quiet that
Page 47 and 48: to the nature of the electromagneti
Page 49 and 50: something. Chris was smart and frie
Page 51 and 52: 13 But why? Why would a twenty-year
Page 53 and 54: including Charles Darwin, Thomas Ed
Page 55 and 56: 14 Knight actually did have a plan.
Page 57 and 58: the sorts of places where it’s ne
Page 59 and 60: their canoe has been borrowed and r
Page 61 and 62: 16 Knight lived in the dirt but was
Page 63 and 64: he was famished for words, he’d s
Page 65 and 66: Knight had a strong distaste for bi
Page 67 and 68: Knight’s camp. He began observing
Page 69 and 70: 18 The only book Knight didn’t st
Page 71 and 72: my winter toilet. Do my business. T
Page 73 and 74: pen name. “Human society has been
Page 75 and 76: do telethons? I hate Jerry Lewis.
Page 77 and 78: fed her, but with Knight she had no
Page 79 and 80: 21 A thousand poets sing of solitud
Page 81: “psychologically completely out o
Page 85 and 86: changes is where the brain is funct
Page 87 and 88: His thieving raids became considera
Page 89 and 90: to sing, with his food supplies nea
Page 91 and 92: inherited from her mother, and a co
Page 93 and 94: 25 A side door to the jail swings o
Page 95 and 96: Jail, he’s realized, might not be
Page 97 and 98: 26 Chris’s oldest brother, Daniel
Page 99 and 100: That note, thirty-four words long,
Page 101 and 102: the bright side. The sun will come
Page 103 and 104: 28 A mile down the road, I pull ove
Page 105 and 106: It’s now just a spot in the woods
Page 107 and 108: For insight into Knight: Matt Hongo
Page 109 and 110: Annette Schipf Chris Anderson David
Page 111 and 112: David and Louise Proulx, whose tiny
Page 113 and 114: A Note About the Author Michael Fin
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