The Amazing Story of the Man who Became a Hermit at Age 20 and was Speechless for Almost Three Decades

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Christopher Knight spent 27 years of his life avoiding the world in a tiny shelter in the middle of a forest in the United States. Both he and another woman in Scotland explain their reasons for having turned their backs on everything and everyone and what they found in their years as hermits.

any people do not like loneliness. For others it can be a source of ecstasy. Shabnam Grewal, of the BBC, describes how it was the life of the American who turned his back on the world when he was just out of his teens. He also spoke with a Scottish hermit to find out his motives. This is what he learned.

In 1986, Christopher Knight, 20, entered a forest in rural Maine, in the northeastern United States. He left his car and after taking only some basic supplies to camp, he walked into the forest and did not leave for 27 years.

After getting lost by his own decision, Knight found the site that would become his home, a small clearing in the wooded area surrounding a lake called North Pond. He spread a tarp between the trees, lifted his small nylon tent and settled down.

It was completely hidden, despite being only a few minutes walk from one of the hundreds of summer cabins that are scattered in the area. Knight survived breaking into these cabins and a community center where he stole supplies. But he only took what he needed: food, cooking fuel, clothes, boots, batteries for torches and many books.

He tried to cause as little damage as possible, but the large number of robberies, more than 1,000 over the years, caused much anxiety for some of the owners of those places.

Finally, the police set a trap and caught him with his hands in the dough.

Writer Mike Finkel visited Knight in prison to write The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. (“The stranger in the forest: The extraordinary story of the last true hermit”).

He asked the necessary question: “Why?”

What was the reason to turn your back on the world and go live in complete solitude?

“Chris Knight said he felt very uncomfortable being around other people, at first I thought it might have been a specific action that motivated him, I asked him, ‘Did you commit a crime? Was there something you were ashamed of? Was there a specific action?”, Explains Finkel.

“He insisted that there was none of that at all, he said that the impulse to be alone was like a gravitational force, his whole body said he felt more comfortable alone.”

This impulse was so strong that he decided to spend almost three decades without talking to anyone. Or almost, he said “Hi” to a hiker who ran into him one day.

Despite the harsh winters of Maine, where temperatures can drop to -20 ° C, Knight says he never lit a fire to prevent smoke from attracting attention.

“There are many aspects of Christopher Knight’s story that stun the mind,” says Finkel.

“If I spent one night in the Maine woods in the winter, camping in a thin-walled nylon tent and did not light a fire, I would be very surprised, if I did it for a week, I would be shocked, and a month would be amazing. This guy did it for 27 full winters.”

Knight told Finkel he was going to sleep early, around 7 pm, and set an alarm at 3 a.m., the coldest hour of the night. Then he would get up and walk until dawn, to keep warm.

Finkel asked him what he was doing to pass the time.

“During one part he read some books, did crossword puzzles … but in reality he did not occupy most of his time, what he did was what anyone could call ‘nothing’.”

If the idea of ​​sitting alone, for half an hour, with nothing to do is a bit frightening, try to imagine what it would be like to confine yourself in a small clearing in the forest, for days, weeks, months, years…

“When I asked Chris Knight to explain that ‘nothing’, he had some very interesting things to say,” says Finkel.

“First he was never a boring moment, at age 27. He never felt alone, he said he felt almost the opposite, that he felt totally and intricately connected with everything else in the world.” It was hard for him to say where his body ended and they started the forests, he said that he felt this total communion with nature and the outside world. ”

It sounds like a mystical experience, not caused by psychedelic drugs, but by loneliness.

Christopher Knight spent seven months in prison for his thefts and decided not to talk to any reporters other than Mike Finkel. With many more questions in mind, searching for hermits on Google was necessary.

Sara Maitland lives in solitude in Scotland in a simple and beautiful house that she herself built. From the door of his house you can see miles and miles of an empty moor hit by the wind.

Maitland is Christian, but, unlike the “official” Christian hermits that still exist, it is not overseen by the local bishop.

She says that many people think that being a hermit is being selfish.

“If I say that I want to sail in a small boat around the world and it takes me two years to do it, everyone says: ‘How exciting!’ But if I say that I want to go sit in my house and not talk to anyone during two years, they say ‘do you have mental health problems?’ or ‘why are you so selfish?’ “he says.

How do you answer the question of why you are doing it? What do you get by spending long periods of time alone and in silence? The answer, she says, is “ecstasy.”

“Silence is a place where I can find ecstasy, I only get it in silence and most of the people I know only get it in silence It’s just a fabulous feeling You know, you’re walking and suddenly you just say ‘ Yes!’ It’s an extraordinarily intense response, totally cheerful. ”

For her, this ecstasy is a connection with God.

“I am trying to put myself in a place so that the gift of mystical prayer is available to me, because in reality the presence of God is a tremendously pleasant experience, I think it is heaven, literally! I believe that this is how heaven should be, that extraordinary feeling of full privacy,” he explains.

The woman says that you must be alone for a certain time before you start having this sensation, but sometimes other things happen when you are alone. In the book A Book Of Silence he writes about his experiences of loneliness and those of others.

Inhibitions are lost and a person becomes who he really is when he is not acting or trying to please others. This could mean from nose-biting a lot to singing out loud or walking without clothes.

Or something she calls “sensory intensification”, which for Maitland makes the sense of taste more and more acute.

“Food simply tastes fabulous, but not because it tastes particularly fabulous in any mysterious sense, but because it tastes more, so oat flakes taste like oat flakes,” he says.

“But they also affect the way you experience physical things, like showers, the showers are fabulous, and not just a little warm water, but they become a luxury experience,” he adds.

She started hearing things.

In fact, auditory hallucinations are a common experience for the hermits, and she heard the sound of a great chorus, singing in Latin, from a small room in the small house in which she lived.

Maitland enjoyed most of these and other effects of loneliness, but only because she had chosen to be there.

Consider that someone held against his will, in solitary confinement, instead of a wonderful choir would hear unpleasant voices that would tell him to hurt himself.

Or its sensory intensification could mean that the sound of a toilet becomes painfully loud and intense. However, loneliness in everyday life can be very hard.

Maitland notes that people often encounter silence for the first time after the death of a loved one, or when a relationship breaks down. That’s why he thinks it would be better if people learned in childhood to experience solitude as something positive.

“I say you should never go to your room as punishment, you can use it as a reward, something like ‘Honey, you’ve been so good all day, you’ve been so useful, why do not you go to your room for half an hour now and Are you left alone? ‘

For Christopher Knight, the hermit of Maine, loneliness and silence were the reward. He wanted to live his life in that little place in the forest, die there among the trees, leaving nothing behind.

“In this age of Facebook and social networks, this is a person who literally did not want to know anything,” says Mike Finkel.

“He never had a camera, he never kept a diary, nothing, he wanted to live completely unknown and he was close to succeeding.”

Source: Lanacion