Quotes from Michael Finkel

He does not care if people fail to understand what he did in the woods. He didn't do it for us to understand.

Even Henry David Thoreau, not known for kvetching, wrote in The Maine Woods that he was "seriously molested" by bugs.

Time amid the silence of nature, in other words, makes you smarter.

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.

People are to be taken in very small doses," wrote Emerson. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

PBS was "carefully crafted for liberal baby boomers with college degrees,

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders;

He wondered if modern society, with its flood of information and tempest of noise, was only making us dumber.

The internet, wrote Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, his book about brain science and screen time, steadily chips away at one's "capacity for concentration and contemplation.

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.

Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture or discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed

The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do," wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. "In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised.

After ten days in solitary confinement, many prisoners display clear signs of mental harm, and one study showed that about a third will eventually develop active psychosis. There are at least eighty thousand such inmates in America. The United Nations has determined that holding a person in isolation for more than fifteen days is cruel and inhuman punishment.

I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode,

Everything moves at light speed, without rest. "It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia. The inappropriate choices of aspirations and goals.

Isolation is the raw material of greatness; being alone is hazardous to our health. Few other conditions produce such diametrically opposing reactions, though of course genius and craziness often share a fence line. Sometimes even voluntary solitude can send a person over to the wrong side of the fence.

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.

Fighting against everything, he may have realized, only makes one's life infinitely harder. He has seen the bottomless nonsense of our world and has decided, like most of us, to simply try to tolerate it. He appears to have surrendered. It is rational, yet heartbreaking.

reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. "I recognize myself

Some items had been in place for so long that the trees grew around them. A claw hammer was nearly swallowed by a tree trunk, impossible to remove, and Hughes said that this hammer, more than anything, made him realize how long Knight had lived there.

Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see "the unfathomable stupidity of man." Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Wherever is the crowd is a common denominator of stench." Knight's best friend, Thoreau, believed that all societies, no matter how well intentioned, pervert their citizens. Sartre wrote, "Hell is other people.

Japanese researchers at Chiba University found that a daily fifteen-minute walk in the woods caused significant decreases in cortisol, along with a modest drop in blood pressure and heart rate.

It isn't action, he suspects, that usually lands a thief in prison. It's hesitation.

I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.