The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

changes is where the brain is functioning.
Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple
of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading,
the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be
activated—the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas.
Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper
level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
While sitting slump-shouldered on his stool in the visiting booth of the jail, speaking of his inner
voyages, Knight seemed to be in an introspective mood. I wondered, despite his aversion to dispensing
wisdom, if he’d be willing to share more of what he learned while alone. People have been approaching
hermits with this request for thousands of years, eager to consult with someone whose life has been so
radically different. James Joyce wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that a solitary person is
able to tap into “the wild heart of life.”
Responses from hermits have often been elusive. Tenzin Palmo, pressed for her conclusions about living
silently in a cave for a dozen years, said only, “Well, it wasn’t boring.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “He
that thinks most, will say least.” The Tao Te Ching says, “Those who know do not tell; those who tell do not
know.” The great computer Deep Thought, in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, worked
on the problem for seven and a half million years, then revealed that the answer to life, the universe, and
everything was the number forty-two.
Now it felt like my turn to ask. Was there some grand insight, I questioned Knight, revealed to him in the
wild? I was serious about the request. Profound truths, or at least those that make sense of the seeming
randomness of life, have always eluded me. What Knight had done was like what Thoreau had—it may, in
fact, be the men’s similarities that is the source of Knight’s contempt. Thoreau wrote in Walden that he had
reduced existence to its basic elements so that he could “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Maybe, I thought, Knight would talk about the marrow.
He sat quietly, whether thinking or fuming or both, it was hard to tell. But he eventually arrived at a
reply. It felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.
“Get enough sleep,” he said.
He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn’t be saying any more. This was what he’d learned. I
accepted it as truth.