“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 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 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 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.
23
Conscious of time’s flow or not, Knight was still subject to its laws. He grew older. His survival skills peaked, his efficiency was honed, but like an athlete in decline, his body could not keep pace. For a while he was able to haul two propane tanks on his back. Then he could carry only one.
His eyesight was a constant concern. He’d had poor vision since his youth and was obsessive about protecting his eyeglasses. “I knew if I broke my glasses that would be it,” he said, “and that carefulness extended to my whole body.” Then, without humor—his preferred way of framing a quip—he added, “No cartwheels over boulders for me.”
Even so, the world beyond an arm’s length gradually lost focus. His glasses eventually failed him, and everything in the woods became more or less a blur. Each time he saw a pair of glasses during a break-in, he tried them on, but he never found a better prescription. He’d always used his ears more than his eyes, so by the time he couldn’t see well, it didn’t matter much. He was in his home territory. “Do you need glasses to move about your home? No. I didn’t, either.”
Most hermits across history, secular ones especially, did not grow old in seclusion. They waited until they were already fairly old, with a stockpile of experience and wisdom, to leave the world. Knight vanished at twenty and never again received a word of guidance or instruction. He turned to no elder for advice. He was king and janitor of his tiny realm, and the rest of the world, he believed, had nothing to teach him, no wonder to offer. His decisions were purely his own.
He sacrificed college, a career, a wife, children, friends, vacations, cars, sex, movies, phones, and computers. He had never in his life sent an e-mail or even seen the internet. His milestones were less significant. Knight switched, at some point, from drinking tea to coffee. Classical music, he eventually realized, soothed him more than rock did. His pet mushroom grew. The handheld game players he stole got smaller and better. He knew, even with blurry vision, when each bald eagle pair nesting in his forest had hatchlings. He began to drink more alcohol.
He fell a couple of times, hard, though never broke a bone. Once he slipped on some ice and banged his left arm so badly he couldn’t pick up a cup for a month, but that was the worst injury he sustained. As he aged, the usual bruises on his hands and wrists from living outdoors seemed to linger; they didn’t heal the way they used to. His teeth constantly hurt.
Questions crept into his mind. He wondered if all the sugar he was eating was making him diabetic. He thought about cancer, or the possibility of a heart attack, yet he did not consider seeing a doctor. He accepted his mortality as is.
His thieving raids became considerably more challenging, as cabin owners upgraded locks and installed security systems that were far more complex than any he’d dealt with during his brief time in the workplace. Surveillance cameras became both difficult to incapacitate and widely used.
And despite his fanatical caution on his thieving raids, during which the primary rule was never to break into an occupied cabin, the law of averages began to catch up with him. He finally experienced what he called “an anomaly.” Or maybe he got a touch sloppy or overconfident, after so many hundreds of successes.
One midweek summer evening in 2012, Kyle McDougle, whose family has owned property on North Pond for generations, decided to stay alone at the family’s cabin. McDougle was twenty at the time, and had heard hermit stories all his life. His grandfather especially liked telling them. McDougle was working for a fiber-optics firm, driving around in a big company truck that couldn’t fit on narrow roads, so he left the rig some distance away. It was probably the only time in his life, McDougle says, that he didn’t park a vehicle in the cabin’s driveway. He crawled into a sleeping bag in the cabin’s upstairs loft.
“I wake up and I hear someone on the stairs and I see a flashlight,” recalled McDougle. He shouted a greeting and got no response, and knew right away it wasn’t a family member showing up in the middle of the night. “I didn’t have a flashlight, or a knife, or a gun, and I’m trapped upstairs, so my immediate thought was to scare him, so I yelled, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ plus a whole bunch of swearwords, shouting at the top of my lungs.” With this, the intruder immediately retreated or maybe tumbled down the stairs—“It was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” said McDougle—and fled out of the cabin.
McDougle never saw the trespasser, but he noted that the screen was popped out of one of the cabin’s windows and propped against a wall. “I was obviously very freaked out. I called the police, but there wasn’t a heck of a lot they could do.”
Knight felt terrible about the incident. “I hate to think that I scared someone like that,” he said. “That really bothers me.”
As Knight aged, the population of North Pond gradually increased, a few more ho
mes built or expanded each year, families growing, more people in the forest. Knight was alert for unusual sounds. He often heard hikers, but not too near his camp, and on those rare occasions when he sensed a person while he was moving through the trees, he had plenty of time to dash away and quietly hide.
Except once. It was during the day, sometime in the 1990s, before he began walking almost exclusively at night and never on trails. He was on a lightly traveled path, and came around a bend, and with no advance warning, there was someone else. Knight can’t say what the hiker looked like—he made no eye contact. He tried to put on a nonchalant face, but he felt panicky. Neither man stopped. Knight said, “Hi,” and the man said, “Hi,” and they continued on their separate ways.
This was his only encounter for more than twenty years. Then, during a cold winter day, while Knight was ensconced in his camp, he heard a group of people in the forest, postholing through the snow. The steps grew louder and nearer, tree branches snapping like firecrackers, Knight’s distress rising, until he made the decision to step out of his camp and assess the situation. He didn’t want to be seen, but he couldn’t risk anyone stumbling upon his home.
He walked a dozen quiet steps and there they were, breathing heavily in the crisp air. Three men, three generations of the same family—son, father, and grandfather—tromping happily through the woods after a day of ice fishing. Knight ducked down, he said, but it was too late. He’d been spotted. According to Knight, one of the men shouted, “Hey!”
Knight stood. He had on a black ski cap and a blue jacket over a hooded sweatshirt and was clean-shaven. The father, Roger Bellavance, held up his hands, one clutching a pair of binoculars, demonstrating that he had no gun. Knight’s hands had been in his pockets, but he pulled them out. He showed that he had no weapon, either. “I tried to convey the idea that I was harmless, no threat, using only my hands. I did not come close to them.” Knight insisted that he did not speak a word—“I communicated nonverbally”—though the Bellavances recalled him a mumbling a few phrases.
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