01c. 1969 ADIn 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being "psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life."When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. "While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. "You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying." A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
02c. 1969 ADHe pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
03c. 1969 ADKnight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...Michael Finkel / quote ↗
04c. 1969 ADThe only book Knight didn't steal was the one he most often saw. 'I had no need for a Bible,' he said.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
05c. 1969 ADWith 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
06c. 1969 ADHis chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. 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. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
07c. 1969 ADIt's possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
08c. 1969 ADI'm not used to seeing people's faces. There's too much information there. Aren't you aware of it? Too much, too fast.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
09c. 1969 ADLanguage 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
11c. 1969 ADModern 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 are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
12c. 1969 ADHe left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
13c. 1969 ADPassion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. "There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
14c. 1969 ADSoon 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
15c. 1969 ADKnight 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
16c. 1969 ADModern 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
17c. 1969 ADSilence, 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
18c. 1969 ADConversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
19c. 1969 ADNot for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. "I'd rather take it to my grave," he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? "It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie, " he said, "or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
20c. 1969 ADThat 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
21c. 1969 ADStill, 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
22c. 1969 ADI understand I've made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
23c. 1969 ADThere was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
24c. 1969 ADThomas 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.Michael Finkel / quote ↗
