The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel. 

3/5 rating. 225 pages.

Book #45 of 2023. Read November 5, 2023.

This is an interesting look into the life of a man described as a hermit who had no direct interaction with people for 27 years.

In 2013, Chris Knight was apprehended as he broke into a camp in order to get some food from the freezer. This was somewhere over his 1000th break-in for food, and was only the third time that he had even been seen by another human being since 1986. That year, Chris simply walked into the woods one day and never walked back out.

He had been living off of small thefts of food and materials in the Maine woods for all that time and had built this urban legend of a Hermit in those parts.

This book talks all about Michael’s interactions with Chris and the attempt to understand all of the backstory, but also why (and how) anyone could forsake human interaction for more than a quarter century.

The part I enjoyed most about this book is the psychological look at Chris. He is very different from most people and shows signs of aspects of Schizoid Personality Disorder and Autism. Michael’s attempts to explain more why someone might do this were an amazing look into people who we might see as different.

One of the saddest, but most poignant statements 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.”

Additional Quotes:

“Our genus, Homo, arose two and a half million years ago, and 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.”

“That silence intimidates puzzles me.”

“He explained about the lack of eye contact. ‘I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast.’”

“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.’”

“The body responds immediately, even during sleep. People who live in cities experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones. These hormones, especially cortisol, increase one’s blood pressure, contributing to heart disease and cellular damage. Noise harms your body and boils your brain. The word ‘noise’ is derived from the latin word nausea.”

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life” – Socrates 

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