4.13 The Secret Life of America’s Last True Hermit（隐士；遁世者）
说明：从今年年初开始学习天天用英语的课程以来，基本上每期都会学习；以我目前的程度，每期课都必须预习过后才能在老师上课的时候跟上老师的节奏；每天挨个查单词预习往往比听课花的时间还有多，今天突然决定把预习过的标注版的文章贴在上，留作记录。
[1]In April 2013, Sergeant（军士，警察小队长）Terry Hughes caught a manbreaking into（闯入）the walk-in（未经预约而来的）fridge of asummer camp for disabled children in centralMaine（缅因州/美国州名）. This was the end of the hunt for Maine’slegendary传奇的North Pond Hermit（北池隐士）, Christopher Knight.
[2]It was a moment akin to类似于catching the yeti雪人snatching hikers（远足者，长途旅行者）off（snatch off:抢了）a Himalayan（喜马拉雅的）mountainside.Except, in this case, the yetishaved（剔；修面）, and some people wistfully thought they might want to livelike him—torun off into（跑到）the woods, hear birds sing, watch water ripple, see snow drop, and
rediscover（重新发现）the ideal ofunalloyed（纯粹的）individualism（个人主义）.Knightdid it for nearly 30 years. InThe Stranger in the Woods, author Michael Finkel uncovers the minute and astonishing（使人吃惊的）elements of Knight’s story. These six made usdo a double take（忍不住多看两眼；突然明白了意思）.
He Didn’t Talk to Anyone for 27 Years
[3]Well, Knight did bump into碰到a hiker once. That day, he looked up, nodded, and said,“Hi.”Then Knight walked on, because he didn’t feel like talking—and he
didn’t talk for the other nearly 10,000 days he spent in the woods. When people are suffering, we tell them, “You’re not alone.” When they feel the need to be understood, we tell them,“I hear you.” When we want to punish people forextreme offenses（极端的犯罪）, we isolate them. The United Nations defines that lastidiosyncrasy（习性，癖好）of ours astorture（拷问，折磨）, by the way. And yet Knight chose to forget the sound of human voices and let his own voice fade（逐渐消失）. The night he was captured and questioned, his sentences were“ stuttery（结结巴巴的）andclanky（叮当叮当的）, an old engine struggling toturn over（发动）, eachsyllable（音节）achore（苦差事）,”as Finkel describes in the book.
He Was Just 20 When He Began HisSeclusion（隐居）
[4]When Knight walked into the woods in 1986, he had never been on a date or even spent a night in a tent. One day, he drove hisSubaru（斯巴鲁汽车）as far as roads would take him into the Mainewoods, less than an hour from where he grew up. He left the keys on thedashboard（仪表板）and started walking south. There weren’t manyindicators(指示) that Knight wanted toabandon（放弃）human contact so completely—he was following some sort ofinner directive（内心指令）that worked on a level removed fromlogic. He told Finkel,“I had no plans when I left, I wasn’t thinking of anything. I just did it.”Knight had a fairly normal childhood in an unusuallyresourceful资源丰富的, slightlyreclusive隐居的NewEngland family. At the time, he was working installing alarm systems and had just bought thenew car. No one expected it, not his school friends or even his brother, who had helpedfund（为……提供资金）the Subaru and would besaddled with背负着the debt for it. One day, Knight simply decided that he wouldlive a life of his own design.
He Lived So Close to a House That He Couldn’tSneeze打喷嚏Aloud
[5]For the vast majority of time he spent in the woods, Knight lived about a three minutewalking distance from the nearest cabin and awashboard搓板状的road, on a 220-acre英亩parcel of land where other simple summer homes were set in the woods along the lake.
To avoiddetection察觉, he never lit a campfire and tried to avoid sneezing. He built his long-term
woodlandencampment营地in anesse ntially根本上invisibleclearing空地between twoboulders, usingtarps防水布,garbage bins垃圾桶, and many issues of National Geographic (great for water drainage—Knight created a level platform in his living space withduct-taped绑bundles of magazines). He was constantlytinkering with（摆弄）the shelter, but no matter the adjustments Knight made, it never provided much warmth. So, in the intense Maine winters, he froze but survived. Knight would lie under a mass of blankets andforce himself to wake in the coldest parts of the night.“What he did in the cold was bothprosaic无聊的乏味的and profound深度的深切的,” Finkel writes. “He suffered.”
He Broke into More Than 1,000 BuildingsBefore Getting Caught
[6]Though he suffered, Knight did find a surprising amount ofsustenance（食物）in other people’s homes. He was an expertburglar（窃贼）. Using skills that lingered from the alarm-installation job,Knight left no trace. Rather than break down doors, he would take them off theirhinges铰链and put them back on later. Most of his neighbors only noticed they’d been robbed when they found thatfood, sleeping bags, clothes, magazines, books, alcohol, or candy were missing. Thiskleptomaniacal偷盗癖mode of survival wassubtle, but it was so consistent that Knight ended upcreating a mood of unease in the cabin community, most of whom were seasonal residents who
used the cabins for their own escapes逃避during the summers. “All Patterson wanted from her cabin was a place to escape the pressures of daily life,” writes Finkel of one of the victims.
“Knight denied her that.” All solitude comes at a cost（孤独是有代价的）, whether for thesecluded（隐居的）or
those who surround him. There Is an Online Hermit Community That Thinks He’sOverrated（过高估计）
[7]Much of the hermit community隐士群体objected to Knight’s particularlyparasitic寄生虫的mode of existence.Yes, there is a hermit community, with an online forum at Hermitary.com. Many of the hermitson that forum declared that Knight couldn’t be considered a real hermit because he stole things.Knight himself agrees—he told Finkel that he does not consider himself a hermit but a
thief.Still, many other modern-day当代的现代的hermits actually live in their parents’ basements oranalogous相似的internet-connected pits and have meals slipped through a crack in the door while they chat online with their hermit friends. In Japan, there are more than half a million of this sort of hermit. They’re known as hikikomori蛰居族，形容那些脱离社会、有些自闭的年轻人and are soprevalent普遍的that the Japanese Ministry of Health,Labor, and Welfare has studied their condition.
[8]Conceptually概念地, it might seem weird that all these hermits, Knight among them, would choose to rely on society in some way. Actually, most of history’s known hermits have interacted with（有相互作用）their societiesto varying degrees不同程度的. There were the walled-off封闭的medieval中世纪的anchorites隐士who ate meals slipped through slots by servants, and then slippedexcrement排泄物back out.
Then there was EverettRuess, who showed up at a shop every once in a very long while before disappearing again intothe desert with hismules骡子. Even theUnabombersent off hisexplosive missives爆炸性的信件through thepostal邮局的service from his woodlandlair巢穴. If there were hermits who’ve never had to interact with society, we’ve never heard of them (for obvious reasons). But Knight does stand out突出引人注目for going the longest period without human contact.
He Hates Henry David Thoreau
[9]When Knight was captured, a media stormbroke over打破了the Kennebec County Jail as journalistsdescended下来from around the world torattle him like hail（像冰雹一样打他）. All of them, including Finkel, tried toglean收集hermit wisdom in the process. In the end, the only major insight Knight expressed to Finkel was “get enough sleep.” Thepithiness有力简洁and grounded接地的practicality实用性of that advice isn’t entirely全部地surprising. It was unlikely that Knight would ever come up withethereal maxims飘渺的格言,memorable aphorisms难忘的格言, orspiritual nuggets精神上的掘金. He brandedThoreau梭罗a “dilettante一知半解者” and said others like him who published andcommodified使商品化their thoughts were false hermits. What Knight took from the woods were not grand cosmic宇宙的insights, but memories of a time when he was attuned to the nature, beautiful andbrutal野蛮的, around him. He remembered how on the warmest days of theyear, the pond would be warm and he wouldstrip脱去衣服and float in it, gazing at the stars. Though he losttrack of time时间的轨道, Knight eagerly anticipated the days around the Fourth of July. Rather than recallinggawking发呆at fireworks with a drunken mass, Knight remembered those times because he could sit back and watch as thepitch-black漆黑的forest around him filled with
fireflies萤火虫.