Hermits

Christopher Knight was a young man in the mid-1980s. He had a home in Maine and a job as a locksmith. Life started to overwhelm him and every encounter with another person seemed to be a stressful, zero-sum situation. One day he climbed into his small SUV and just drove away. First, he drove south on an unplanned road trip. He had no real goals; he just wanted to escape. Eventually, he made his way back to Maine not far from his hometown. He drove the car to the end of the road onto an old trail until, finally, he could go no farther. It was almost dark when he got out of the car and walked away into the woods.

No one knew where he was. No one knew anything about his plans because he had no plans to tell. He just wanted to quit this civilization business. After a few days of wandering in the thick woods, he found a spot between two boulders not far from a small vacation community called North Pond where he built a basic camp. Of necessity, he started stealing stuff to survive. He never wanted to steal, but he wanted to live and did not have other options. He spent most of his time sitting in camp. During the winter, he spent all his time there to avoid tracks in the snow and to stay warm.

The legend of the North Pond thief metastasized. People locked their doors and set up elaborate booby traps, but no one ever saw him or had any evidence that there was a real thief other than missing items. The North Pond hermit turned into local folk lore with some firm believers and many skeptics. In 2013, a local game warden decided to solve this mystery.

He mined a youth camp kitchen building, which had a recurring history of missing food items, with small sensors and wireless alarms. These communicated with a unit in his own bedroom a few miles away. Not long afterward, the alarm rang in the middle of the night. He launched from his bed in a time-driven frenzy and captured a middleaged man exiting the back door of the camp. For the first time in twenty-seven years, Christopher Knight had a face-to-face encounter with a human.

In this fascinating story of extreme isolation and complete disengagement from human-caused stress, what did Knight gain from the experience? Did this prepare him to be engaged and productive when he was finally dragged back into life?

Diogenes was a Greek who lived about four hundred years before Jesus. As a young man, he was a wealthy, aristocratic member of an elite society. His prospects started dimming, however, when he began defacing the national currency. This was a crime so he was exiled and eventually captured and sold as a slave. He morphed into a weirdo that proclaimed on the auction block as he was being sold, “I was born to lead men, so I am looking for a man who needs a master!”

He lived in Corinth as a slave until he was freed, after which he lived on a street corner in a barrel playing the philosophical cynic. The Greeks, at that time, were fascinated with all things spiritual and philosophical so he was tolerated and soon revered as an intellectual.

He would walk down the street in daytime shining a lantern into the faces of men he encountered, yelling, “I am looking for a man!” In modern times this has evolved into the phrase “looking for an honest man,” but in the original Greek, his statement meant simply “looking for a man,” carrying the implication that all people are subhuman. At one point, the Greek science community designated man as “a featherless biped,” so Diogenes showed up at their doorstep carrying a plucked chicken and said “Behold your man.” The Greeks consequently changed their description of humans to “a featherless biped with broad flat nails.”

Diogenes taught by living example rather than lecturing or writing. He tried to demonstrate that wisdom and happiness belong to the man who is independent of society and that civilization is regressive. He scorned not only family and socio-political organization, but also property rights and reputation. He even rejected normal ideas about human decency, hence the barrel on the street corner. Ironically, he was fanatical about separation from all civil things only after everything was taken from him.

These are two men who faced conflicts either internal or external and decided to reject the whole package and separate themselves from all human-caused stress and damaging, regressive society. Did this produce the higher, more in-tune mentality that transcended the messiness of the homo sapiens situation? Did they achieve what they were looking for? Whatever we can learn from these two people, they did not gain the wisdom and happiness that it seemed they could have. Diogenes did develop some memorable insights and cynically thoughtful statements, but as a man, he was impossible. Alexander the Great came to visit Diogenes. Alexander asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunlight.” Diogenes reportedly died from food poisoning or an infected dog bite.

When Christopher Knight was in prison, he thought he was going to die from the sensory deluge. He would not look at someone’s face because it was too intense. When he was finally sent to live with his parents, he isolated again as much as possible but did not disappear again. He made a plan to spend a night with “the lady of the woods,” which was simply suicide by freezing. On a sub-zero night in the Maine winter, he wanted to just walk away into the woods and stay there until he met the “lady”. As far as I know, he has not completed the plan, thank God, but still lives in isolation in Maine.

Life as a human on earth is stressful and messy and seems to get more complicated the longer we live. What is the correct response to this unfortunate dilemma? We can try to escape and minimize the impacts of relationships and responsibility. If not to the extremes of the above examples, we can just back away and try to lessen the entanglements.

Yet, the ideal person would respond with kindness and patience to everything. They would be able to discern the central and the peripheral and direct their focus to where it counts. They would have tolerance for differences and be faithful until the end.

My wife said, “You would think if there were no large catastrophes like death or unfaithfulness or disease, we would automatically have good, cheerful attitudes and be overflowing with fruit of the Spirit.” To my shame, this does not seem to be the case. I have not faced big, hard things, but I still lose my cool and mouth off. I respond in frustration and unkindness at fatiguingly regular intervals to inane things that should not move the level bubble at all. If we did face difficult tests of faith, would that produce good results? Observation indicates not necessarily. All of us know the bitter person who blames the world for giving him a bum rap.

The desire to quit and withdraw is a powerful force with delusional hints of glory. In reality, it is cowardly and shows the world that there was nothing meaningful inside the facade. The person was just an empty shell. If surviving enervating catastrophes does not inevitably produce the ideal person, and avoiding or escaping these situations does not provide the key to life, the key must be found somewhere else. Profound, I know.