Quotes by Michael Finkel

In 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 bodys 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.

He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. Whats 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.

Knights disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - he had no deep insight into nature...

The only book Knight didnt steal was the one he most often saw. I had no need for a Bible, he said.

With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, hes realized, might not be all bad. Theres routine and order in jail, and hes able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one hed perfected during winters in the woods. Im surrounded in here by less than desirable people, he says, but at least I wasnt thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.

His 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, theres innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. Its 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.

Its 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.

Im not used to seeing peoples faces. Theres too much information there. Arent you aware of it? Too much, too fast.

Language 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.

I read. Thats my form of travel.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe its 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 were surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.

He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him.

Passion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain.

Soon 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 cant keep quiet.

Knight 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.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe its 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.

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.

Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, theres innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. Its part of being human.

Not 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. Id 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.

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 cant keep quiet.