The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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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