The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

simply existed, for the most part, in the perpetual now. He does not care if people fail to understand what he
did in the woods. He didn’t do it for us to understand. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. There was no point.
“You’re just there,” Knight said. “You are.”
Tenzin Palmo, who was born Diane Perry, near London, was only the second Western woman to become
a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Long retreats are still commended in Buddhism, and the current Dalai Lama wrote
that a life of seclusion is “the highest form of spiritual practice.” Palmo felt immensely drawn to solitude,
and in 1976, when she was thirty-three years old, she moved into a remote cave in the Himalayas of
northern India. She ate one meal a day—supplies were occasionally delivered to her—and lived through
intense high-alpine winters, spending most of her time meditating. A seven-day blizzard once blocked her
cave entrance, threatening asphyxiation.
Palmo remained in the cave for twelve years. She never once lay down; she slept, sitting up, inside a small
wooden meditation box. Her solitude, she said, was “the easiest thing in the world.” Not for a moment did
she want to be anywhere else. She overcame all fear of death, she insisted, and felt liberated. “The more you
realize, the more you realize there is nothing to realize,” she said. “The idea that there’s somewhere we have
got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion.”
The British naturalist Richard Jefferies spent much of his short life—he died of tuberculosis in 1887, at
age thirty-eight—walking alone in the woods of England. Some of his ideas seemed to parallel Knight’s.
Jefferies wrote, in his autobiography The Story of My Heart, that the type of life celebrated by society, one
of hard work and unceasing chores and constant routine, does nothing but “build a wall about the mind.”
Our whole lives, Jefferies said, are wasted traveling in endless small circles; we are all “chained like a horse
to an iron pin in the ground.” The richest person, Jefferies believed, is the one who works least. “Idleness,”
he wrote, “is a great good.”
For Jefferies, like Knight, the desire to be alone was an irresistible tug. “My mind required to live its own
life apart from other things,” wrote Jefferies. In solitude, he said, he could ponder ideas that allowed him to
“go higher than a god, deeper than prayer”; there was nothing greater than to stand alone, “bare-headed
before the sun, in the presence of the earth and air, in the presence of the immense forces of the universe.”
But isolation has a razor’s edge. For others, for those who do not choose to be alone—for prisoners and
hostages—a loss of one’s socially created identity can be terrifying, a plunge into madness. Psychologists
call it “ontological insecurity,” losing your grip on who you are. Edward Abbey, in Desert Solitaire, a
chronicle of two six-month stints as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Monument, said that being solitary
for a long time and fully attuned to the natural world “means risking everything human.” Those who fear
this will feel only loneliness, the pain of social isolation, rather than experiencing solitude, which can be by
turns exhilarating and turbulent.
“I was never lonely,” said Knight. He was attuned to the completeness of his own presence rather than to
the absence of others. Conscious thought was sometimes replaced with a soothing internal humming. “Once
you taste solitude, you don’t grasp the idea of being alone,” he said. “If you like solitude, you’re never alone.
Does that make sense? Or is that one of those koan thingies I’m doing again?”
In an attempt to gain some empirical understanding of solitude, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York
University placed more than twenty Buddhist monks and nuns inside magnetic resonance imaging machines,
tracking blood flow to their brains while they meditated. Other neuroscientists conducted similar studies.
The results remain preliminary, but it appears that when the human brain experiences a self-consciously
chosen silence, as opposed to sleep, the brain does not slow down. It remains as active as ever. What