Quotes from Michael Finkel

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less we are able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.

And right then, I come the closest I think I ever will to understanding why Knight left. He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him. He was never happy in his youth -- not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. It made him feel constantly nervous. There was no place for him, and instead of suffering further, he escaped. It wasn't so much a protest as a quest; he was like a refugee from the human race. The forest offered him shelter (p 182)

Soon he essentially stopped talking. "I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode," he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised," he wrote, "by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

life isn't about searching endlessly to find what's missing; it's about learning to live with the missing parts.

Tao Te Ching says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom. "Those with less become content," says the Tao, "those with more become confused." The poems, still widely read, have been hailed as a hermit manifesto for more than two thousand years.

Freud said there's no such thing as a joke—a joke is an expression of veiled hostility.

People earnestly say to me here, 'Mr Knight, we have cellphones now, and you're going to really enjoy them.' That's their enticement for me to rejoin society. 'You're going to love it,' they say. I have no desire. And what about a text message? Isn't that just using a telephone as a telegraph? We're going backwards.

for more than ninety-nine percent of human existence, we all lived like Onwas, in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Though the groups may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone, anthropologists conjecture, spent significant parts of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a few others, foraging for edible plants and stalking prey in the wild. This is who we truly are.

Everyone dreams of dropping out of the world once in a while. Then you get in the car and drive back home.

He was never once bored. He wasn't sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom. It applied only to people who felt they had to be doing something all the time, which from what he'd observed was most people. Hermits of ancient China had understood that wu wei, "non-doing," was an essential part of life, and Knight believes there isn't nearly enough nothing in the world anymore.

With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he's realized, might not be all bad. There's routine and order in jail, and he's able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he'd perfected during winters in the woods. "I'm surrounded in here by less than desirable people," he says, "but at least I wasn't thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.

Not till we have lost the world," wrote Thoreau, "do we begin to find ourselves.

Such a display of beauty and happiness is not possible without contentment,

Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.

Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.

There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.

Knight seemed to weigh the precision of every word he used, careful as a poet. Even his handwritten letters had gone through at least one draft, he said, mostly to remove unnecessary insults. Only necessary ones remained.

He mentioned that he didn't like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn't quite true. "I don't like people who like Jack Kerouac," he clarified.

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 revel 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 had learned. I accepted it as truth.

Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, largely withdrew from public life for thirty years. "All profound things," he wrote, "are preceded and attended by Silence.

When he hears how songs are now shared and downloaded, Knight is equally unimpressed. "You're using your computers, your thousand-dollar machines, to listen to the radio? Society is taking a rather strange turn.

One's desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin—sometimes called the master chemical of sociability—and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

He gorged himself on sugar and alcohol—it was the quickest way to gain weight, and he liked the feeling of inebriation.

survive, and neither do the strong. Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.