I am a spiteful man I am an unattractive man." The book's opening lines are: "I am a sick man. "I recognize myself in the main character," he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart form all others for about twenty years. “There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Chinese texts etched on animal bones, as well as the clay tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from Mesopotamia dating to around 2000 B.C., refer to shamans or wild men residing alone in the woods. Recorded history extends back five thousand years, and for as long as humans have been writing, we have been writing about hermits. To a thin but steady stream of people, this was unacceptable, so they escaped. The agricultural revolution began twelve thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and the planet was swiftly reorganized into villages and cities and nations, and soon the average person spent virtually no time alone at all. 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.
“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.
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit 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.” "While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. 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."
For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. “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 body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues.
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