Fortunately, Knight was given a chance to be heard beyond his stutters. Just this year, American journalist Michael Finkel released a book on Knight entitled The Stranger in the Woods.
Penguin Random House
Writing the book required Finkel to meet with Knight in jail. There, they conversed over the course of nine one-hour sessions.
Christopher Knight has stated in several interviews that he is not proud of what he had done.
Maine Vacations
He does not champion himself as a master burglar and is genuinely sorry to those he had harmed. As for his life as a hermit, Knight has had a few words to say about that as well.
Knight has frequently been compared to the great American author and somewhat of a hermit himself, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is famous for his 1854 book “Walden” in which he went to live alone at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Though he was not necessarily a fan of Thoreau, Knight could not help balking at the comparison. Sure, he immersed himself in nature and wrote about it in great lengths. But Knight felt that Thoreau had motives that were much different than his own for going out into the solitude of nature.
Wikipedia
To Knight, he felt that Thoreau did not go out into nature for the experience itself, but rather for the chance to show off what he could do. Meanwhile, Knight had deep, personal reasons for wanting to be completely alone. But what was going through his head during all his years alone?
Artists, poets, and dreamers alike cherish solitude. Just the word itself in its polysyllabic majesty evokes a sense of grandeur and purpose. William Wordsworth, in his famous poem “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” remarked: “They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.”
For Knight, solitude wasn’t always so poetic. Sometimes even silence itself deafens. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable,” he mused. “I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.”
“I was never lonely,” Knight remarked. “If you like solitude, you are never alone.” Knight did not even keep a mirror in his boulder shelter. He’d catch glimpses of himself only when he would pass by some still water or catch his reflection in the glass of a window. But he didn’t need to know what he looked like to know who he was. Even if he had shed his identity and name long ago, he was still content with himself.
The New York Times
That is how he was able to survive all that time without going crazy or getting immensely depressed and lonely. Most others would not likely share his sentiments and heavily base their sense of self on others. Knight’s entire identity was based on something else entirely, as is shown on the next page.
