In this thread I will narrate the life of Christopher Knight

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On Knight's relationship with his family in his youth

>"As a young boy, when the lilacs bloomed, Chris would gather a bouquet and give them to his mother. "I like the door and the color, and it's one of the first flowers in spring. I remember thinking I'd found something new," he said. Otherwise there were few overt expressions of love. "We didn't feel the need to communicate everything all the time," Chris continued. "We're not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We're not touchy-feely. [...] In my family, the boys could not express feelings. We relied on unspoken understandings. It was the way it was."

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On Knight's parents

>"His parents were strict - early curfews, finish your homework, no junk food. One cousin, Kevin Nelson [...] used to bicycle over to the Knights' house carrying treats for the boys. "They would lower a string from a bedroom window, and they'd raise a bag of snacks," Nelson said. "I don't believe they ever had a soda pop."

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>>36421131
Continue, this seems interesting enough

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On Knight as a young man

>"People who knew Chris as a child called him "quiet" and "shy" and "nerdy", but no one detected any deeper malaise. "I didn't find him to be all that weird," said Jeff Young, who went to elementary school, junior high, and high school with Chris and often rode the bus with him. "He was a wicked smart kid, and he had a really good sense of humour"

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On Knight's school experience

>"At Lawrence High School [...] Chris felt "invisible". He attended no social events, played no sports, joined no clubs. He never went to a football game and he skipped the prom"

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On Knight learning survival skills in highschool

"During his senior year, Knight, like most Maine public school students, attended a course called Hunter Safety and Outdoor Skills. [...] "This is something that keeps replaying in my mind," said his teacher, Bruce Hillman. "I told every kid that if you in a survival situation, life or death, and you come upon a camp, it's okay to break in. This is accepted in Maine. [...] I was thinking of a survival situation lasting two or three days, nor twenty years."

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interesting thread, OP. bumping.

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On Knight's disappearance

>"He did not tell anyone where he was going. "I had no one to tell," he said. "I didn't have any friends. I had no interest in my co-workers." He drove the Brat south. He was twenty years old. He ate fast food and stayed in cheap motels [...] and drove for days, until he found himself deep into Florida. [...] Eventually he turned around and headed north"

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On some reasons for his desire to escape society

>"Something happened to Chris on that drive, the first and only road trip of his life. He headed north, through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia, blessed with the invincibility of youth, buzzed by "the pleasure of driving," and an idea grew into a realization, then solidified into a resolve. All his life, he's been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision. As he drove [...] he felt within himself some rumblings of fear and thrill, as if at the precipice of a radical leap"

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On his making the decision to leave society

>""I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that." He went as far into the wilderness as his vehicle [pic related] would take him/ He parked the car and put the keys on the center console. He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Without knowing where he was going, with no particular place in mind, he stepped into the trees and walked away."

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bumporiginalino

keep going please senpai

humhmm

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On Knight's family's reaction to his disappearance

>"Two of Knight's brothers, Joel and Timothy, visited him in jail, the only members of the family to do so. Chris didn't recognize them, he admitted; only Joel's laugh sounded familiar. The brothers said they'd often wondered what had happened to Chris. They had supposed he was dead but had never expressed this thought to their mother. They'd always wanted to give her hope that he was still alive. [...] His family apparently never contacted the police about Chris's disappearance. They did not file a missing person report. "They assumed I was off doing something on my own," said Chris. "Having an adventure. We Yankees, we see the world differently. "

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On Knight's experience during winter

>"He remained in his small nylon tent, he insists, and did not once in all those winters light a fire. Smoke might give his campsite away. Each autumn [...] he stockpiled food at his camp, then didn't leave for five or six months, until the snow had melted enough for him to walk through the forest without leaving prints."

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On Knight barely surviving winter

>"Some years, he made it clear, he barely survived the winter. [...] to get through difficult times, he tried meditating. "I didn't meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death was near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too long."

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You left out the most important part: who the fuck is he and why should I care about his life?

>>36421412
if he's who i think he is, he lived in the wilderness for over 20 years and he survived by breaking into people's cabins and looting their food and supplies. finally, he was discovered and arrested.

I remember reading about this guy when he was captured, was funny how the normie author was beguiled by him and thought he was some sort of mythical anti-establishment hero, when in reality he probably just has aspergers and likes being alone

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On Knight's camp

>"Knight had recycled his old [magazines] as subflooring, creating a platform that was perfectly and also permitted decent drainage of rainwater. [...] The walls of his home, the police photos showed, were constructed of brown and green plastic tarps and large black garbage bags. These were all intricately overlaid, like roof tiles, anchored in place by guylines [...] It was an aesthetically pleasing creation, almost churchlike in appearance, that blended into the color pallet of the forest."

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On Knight's criminal ability

>"The crime scenes themselves were so clean that the authorities offered their begrudging respect. "The level of discipline he showed while he broke into houses," said Hughes, "is beyond what any of us can remotely imagine - the legwork, the reconnaissance, the talent with locks, his ability to get in and out without being detected. [...] The hermit, many officers felt, was a master thief. It was as if he were showing off, picking locks yet stealing little, playing a strange sort of game."

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On Knight's record-breaking crime spree

>"To commit a thousand break-ins before getting caught, a world-class streak, requires precision and patience and daring and luck. [...] His surveillance was clinical, informational, mathematical. [...] He watched the families move about and knew when he could steal."

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>>36421533

His prison sentence was too harsh.

>>36421642
one week plus time served?

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On Knight's survival instincts

>""He set his tent east-west," said Hughes, bobbing his head in reluctant approval. "That wasn't an accident. That's based on survival training. His site is not on top of a hill, not in a valley. It's halfway between. He's following the principles of Sun Tzu, in 'The Art of War'"

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On local residents communicating with Knight

>"One summer, a family had an idea. They taped a pen on a string to their front door along with a handwritten note: "Please don't break in. Tell me what you need and I'll leave it out for you." This sparked a small fad, and soon a half dozen cabins had notes fluttering from their doors. Other residents hung shopping bags of books on their doorknobs, like donations to a school fund-raiser. There was no reply to the notes; none of the shopping bags were touched. The break-ins continued"

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On the scale of Knight's crimes

>"At a North Pond home owners' meeting in 2004, nearly fifteen years into the mystery, the hundred people present were asked who had suffered break-ins. At least seventy-five raised their hands."

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>>36421735
Why is setting his tent east-west good for survival?

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On The Lady of the Woods

>"He says that he's seen the Lady of the Woods before, during a very bad winter. [...] He was in his bed, in his tend, starving, freezing, dying. The Lady appeared. She was wearing a hooded sweater, a feminine Grim Reaper. She lifted her eyebrow and lowered her hood. She asked if he was doing with her or staying. He says he's aware, on an intellectual level, that it was just some fevered, desperate hallucination, but he's not entirely sure."

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On Knight's social contact

>"sometime in the 1990s, he encountered a hiker while walking in the woods. "What did you say?" asks Vince. "I said, 'Hi'," Knight replies. Other than that single syllable, he insists, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this evening, for twenty-seven years".

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On Knight as a notable hermit

>"His seclusion was not pure, he was a thief, but he persisted for twenty-seven years while speaking a total of one word and never touching anyone else. Christopher Knight, you could argue, is the most solitary known person in all of human history."

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original bumping - still get banned for 4 seconds

I'll bump. Dude seems pretty interesting

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>>36421876
OP here. Not sure I'm afraid.

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On Knight's love of reading

>"His chief form of entertainment was reading. [...] 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. [...] His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. "

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On Knight's reading habits

>"Knight clearly loved to read. He stole [...] a lot of science fiction and spy novels and best sellers and even Harlequin romances - whatever was available in the cabins of North Pond - but one person also lost a finance textbook, a scholarly World War II tome, and James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. During his arrest, Knight mentioned his admiration for Daniel Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe'. [...] Knight was now reading 'Gulliver's Travels' in jail.""

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On further books Knight enjoyed

>"He liked Shakespeare, 'Julius Caesar' especially, that litany of betrayal and violence. He marvelled at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, sensing her kindred spirit. [...] If he were forced to select a favorite book, it might be 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', by William Shirer. [...] Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - "he had not deep insight into nature" - but Ralph Waldo Emerson was acceptable. "People are to be taken in very small doses," wrote Emerson. [...] Knight read the 'Tao Te Ching' and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. [...] Robert Frost received a thumbs-down [...] and Knight said that when he ran out of toilet paper, he sometimes tore pages from John Grisham novels. He mentioned that he didn't like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn't quite true. "I don't like people like Jack Kerouac," he clarified."

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>>36421735
I don't understand why they cared about him breaking in if they would freely give him stuff.
It's not like he was hurting anyone or stealing shitloads. Fucking dumbass normies.

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On Knight's literary criticism

>"Knight was shy about everything, it seemed, except literary criticism. He wrote that he felt "rather lukewarm" about Ernest Hemingway. He was partial to history and biography, he said, thought he was presently interested in Rudyard Kipling, preferably his "lesser known works.""

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On Knight's opinion of James Joyce

>"He pilfered a copy of 'Ulysses', but it was possible the one book he did not finish. "What's 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 than there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name 'Ulysses' as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.""

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On Knight's appreciation for Dostoevsky

>"There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that the writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoevsky's 'Notes from the Underground'. "I recognize myself in the main character," he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart from all others for about twenty years."

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>>36422223
because it's still stealing shit, how would you like it if some random ass nigga broke into your ass and started stealing your shit

>>36422288
Did he ever lose his virginity?

>>36421401
>They did not file a missing person report. "They assumed I was off doing something on my own,"
for 27 fucking years?

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>>36422321
OP here. No idea, but very unlikely. I'll cover more about that in further posts.
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On Knight's musical tastes

>"Knight stole portable radios and earbuds and tuned in daily [...] he got hooked on classical music - Brahms and Tchaikovsky, yes; Bach, no. "Bach is too pristine," he said. Bliss for him was Tchaikovsky's 'The Queen of Spades'. But his undying passion was classic rock: the Who, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Lez Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and, above all, Lynyrd Skynyrd."

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On Knight's TV preferences

>"On one raid he stole a Panasonic black-and-white five-inch-diagonal television. [...] He also carried off an antenna and hid it high in his treetops. He said everything shown on PBS was "carefully crafted for liberal baby boomers with college degrees," [...] He burned through all his batteries after September 11, 2001, and never watched television again. [...] after he stole a radio that received television audio signals, he switched to listening to TV stations on the radio [...] 'Seinfeld' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond' were his television-on-the-radio favorites."

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On Knight's love of video games

>"He liked handheld video games. His rule for stealing them was that they had to appear outdated; he didn't want to take a kid's new one. [...] He enjoyed Pokemon, Tetris, and Dig Dug. "I like games that require thought and strategy. No shoot-'em-ups. No mindless repetitive motion.""

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On Knight's appreciation for pornography

>"He acknowledged [...] that a couple of cabins were enticing because of their subscriptions to 'Playboy'. He was curious. He was only twenty years old when he disappeared, and had never been out on a date."

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>>36422316
If they don't care about the stuff then it doesn't matter. The problem is they offered anything he wanted up. They don't care what he stole, they're just dumbasses who want to strip him of his dignity and have him beg for food.

He wasn't stealing diamonds and shit.

>>36422330
>for 27 fucking years?
You want your parents babying you for 27 years? He's a fucking adult.

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On Knight's health

>"The price of sociability is sometimes our health. Knight quarantined himself from the human race and thus avoided our biohazards. He stayed phenomenally healthy. Thought he suffered deeply at times, he insists he never once had a medical emergency, or a serious illness, or a bad accident, or even a cold."

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On Knight's diet

>"his culinary preferences never progressed beyond the sugar-and-processed-food palate of a teenager. "'Cooking' is too kind a word for what I did," he said. A staple meal was macaroni and cheese. Dozens of mac-and-cheese boxes were buried between the rocks, along with several empty spice-bottles - black pepper, garlic powder, hot sauce, blackened seasoning. [...] Also in his dump was a flattened thirty-ounce container from cheddar-flavored Goldfish crackers, a a five-pound tub from Marshamallow Fluff, and a box that had held sixteen Drake's Devil Dogs."

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>>36422351
>His rule for stealing them was that they had to appear outdated; he didn't want to take a kid's new one
Great guy. I hope his sentence was short

>>36421056
stop posting this.

orrrrrrrrrrginal

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On Knight's opinion of urban and rural life

>"Knight had a strong distaste for big cities, filled with helpless intellectuals, people with multiple degrees who couldn't change a car's oil. But, he added, it wasn't as if rural areas were Valhalla. "Don't glorify the country," he said, then tossed off a line from the first chapter of 'The Communist Manifesto' about escaping "the idiocy of rural life."

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On Knight's opinion of modern life

>"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. [...] Knight insisted that his escape should not be interpreted as a critique of modern life. "I wasn't consciously judging society or myself, I just chose a different path." Yet he'd seen enough of the world [...] to be repulsed by the quantity of stuff people bought while the planet was casually poisoned, everyone hypnotized into apathy by "a bunch of candy-colored fluff""

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On Knight's love of solitude

>"What I miss most in the woods," Knight said, "is somewhere in between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness". [...] Solitude bestows and increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss the idea. Solitude increases my perception. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant. [...] My desires dropped away. I didn't long for anything. I didn't even have a name. To put it romantically, I was completely free."

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>>36422330
They were right, weren't they?

>>36422288
>'Ulysses' as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.""
/lit/ BTFO

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OP here. Apologies if I skip some details, such as how he was arrested. In short, a local police officer set up a sensor alarm to be triggered when someone broke into the Pine Tree Camp (pic related) and that's how he was caught mid-burglary.

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On Knight feeling like a freak

>"One book that Knight [...] kept [...] with him in his tent - was 'Very Special People', a collection of brief biographies of human oddities: the Elephant Man [...] and hundreds of sideshow performers. Knight himself often felt that he was something of a circus freak, at least on the inside. "If you're born a human oddity," says the introductory chapter of 'Very Special People', "every day of your life, starting in infancy, you are made aware that you are not as others are. [...] You may hide from the world," advises the book, "to avoid the punishment it inflicts on those who differ from the rest in mind or body."

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On Knight's opinion of boredom

>"He was never once bored. He wasn't sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom. It applied only to people who felt they had to be doing something all the time, which from what he'd observed was most people"

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On one officer's reaction to Knight's arrest

>"Everything in my gut wanted to hate this guy," said Hughes. "I'm a typical stubborn jarhead. He stole food from a camp for disabled people. But I can't hate him. You could work in law enforcement a hundred years and never come across anyone like this."

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>>36422741
>He was never once bored. He wasn't sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom.
God I wish that were me.

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On Knight's fondness for a mushroom in his camp

>"His closest companion may have been a mushroom. [...] this particular one, a shelf mushroom, jutted at knee height from the trunk of the largest hemlock in Knight's camp. He began observing the mushroom when its cap was no bigger than a watch face. It grew unhurriedly, wearing a Santa's hat of snow all winter, and eventually, after decades, expanded to the size of a dinner plate, striated with black and gray bands. The mushroom meant something to him; one of the few concerns Knight had after his arrest was that the police officers who'd tromped through his camp had knocked it down. When he learned that the mushroom was still there, he was pleased."

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On Knight's fame

>"Hundreds of journalists, across the United States and the world, attempted to contact him. The New York Times compared him to Boo Radley, the recluse in To Kill a Mockingbird. TV talk shows solicited his presence. A documentary film team arrived in town. [...] The Kennebec County district attorney, Maeghan Maloney, said that Knight [...] had become "the most famous person in the state of Maine."

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On Knight's reaction to his fame

>"Knight himself, the hub of the commotion, resumed his silence. He did not issue a single word publicly. He accepted no offers - no bail, no wife, no poem, no cash. The five hundred or so dollars sent to him were placed in a restitution fund for victims of his thefts."

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>>36422835
Is there a picture of the mushroom?

Great thread, thanks.

>>36421056
http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit

Just post the article

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>>36421056
Nice thread OP. Cheers

>>36422835

Sounds like a top lad.

Wouldn't mind doing something like that myself desu

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On Knight's relationship with other inmates

>"Many of the people he attempted to talk with simply nodded and smiled and thought him "stupid or crazy." Or they just stared at him unabashedly, as if he were some oddity on display. [...] He felt tormented by jail, locked in his case with another inmate. [...] Several more times, he attempted to converse with other inmates. [...] "You talk like a book," one inmate teased him. The guards and jail authorities, Knight noted, approached him with "pity and a small smile.""

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On Knight's experience in prison

>"The conditions in jail - the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowding - mangled his senses. [...] "Bedlam" is how he referred to the place. It never got dark in jail' at eleven p.m., the lights merely became a little duller. "I suspect," he noted, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods"

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On Knight's desire for solitary confinement

>"After his arrest and incarceration, Knight craved solitary confinement. "I have a hope, wish, fantasy of a cell of my own," he wrote in one of his letters. "And to think this would be considered punishment. It is to laugh."

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Thanks for the thread, really interesting seeing how society treats those who simply wish to escape

>the prison system is a catastrophe that does more to damage to society than it does to heal it
whod've thunk

very interesting t b h familia but there are other ways to accomplish such goals, as American you can save up enough money with 2 years of work to be able to live off for decades in a small cabin in third world country only buying cheapest food

>>36422352
>If they don't care about the stuff then it doesn't matter.

Uh, there's a world of difference between giving someone something and breaking into and entering your fucking property, invading your privacy in the process. Are you a retard?

>>36427221

Don't bother answering that question, I forgot what board I was on.

Where did you get the quotes, OP?