Quotes from Michael Finkel

One becomes free, Socrates seems to have taught, not by fulfilling all desires but by eliminating desire.

He'd drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake's top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. "I'd stretch out in the water, " he said, "and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.

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.

There's an ocean of hermit literature; I began my reading on one shore, with Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching (I recommend the Red Pine translation), and started swimming from there. Excellent explorations of the history and motivations of hermits include Solitude by Anthony Storr, A Pelican in the Wilderness by Isabel Colegate, Hermits by Peter France, and Solitude by Philip Koch.

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.

In eighteenth-century England, a fad swept the upper class. Several families felt their estate needed a hermit, and advertisements were placed in newspapers for "ornamental hermits" who were slack in grooming and willing to sleep in a cave.

Those with less become content," says the Tao, "those with more become confused." The

And what about a text message? Isn't that just using a telephone as a telegraph?

Knight, still furious about the image thirty years later, was a man acutely attuned to the ravages of shame. Had he done something shameful before he'd fled to the forest? He insisted that he had not.

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here's

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.

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.

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 chief problem with environmental noise one can't control is that it's impossible to ignore. The human body is designed to react to it.

Knight felt his chest clench with melancholy. How had his life come to this? He occasionally missed his family. 'I suppose a more subtle answer would be, I missed some of my family to a certain degree,' he allowed.

Human society has been mostly an immoral violent bedlam,

else. 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.

Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don't think. It's like there's no atheists in a foxhole. Same with negative twenty. That's when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth.

He's a genius with my Prius," says the co-owner of Left Bank Books, the town's independent bookstore. The

These hermits often wonder how the rest of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we're doing to ourselves. "I have become solitary," wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men

Nature, Knight clarified, is brutal. The weak do not survive, and neither do the strong. Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.

The note was brief—three paragraphs, two hundred and seventy-three words, the lines crowded together as if for warmth.

The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex.