MJV, home run!

     One of the gifts of the USMC was meeting Ed in boot camp 65 years ago this month, forming a decades long friendship. One of the gifts of being posted to a church in Davenport, IA, less than 25 miles from Ed's farm, was friendship with Ed's wife, MJV. She and Joanne quickly bonded into close friendship and I also claim her as 'friend'. 

    MJV is a compulsive reader and her post book essays are worthy of a Master's In English, as she has. When she sent me home with a short book, 191 pages, I was ready after the last 660 page book. Nor, was I disappointed. 

    The Stranger In The Woods, Michael Finkel, begins as a story of  Christopher Knight, who lived as a hermit in the Maine woods for 27 years. He sustained himself near a resort community by burglarizing unoccupied cabins.  His capture occurs early in the book and Finkel, who is a journalist in Montana, is able to establish a relationship with Knight while Knight is jailed. Eventually he receives Knight's tacit approval to write Knight's story.

    The account of Knight's survival in the Maine woods is fascinating on its own. However, Finkel, while reporting that story, enlarges it by a major reflection on solitude. Perhaps MJV noting my adaption to solitude gave me the book, thanks MJV! well chosen!

   "One's desire to be alone, biologists  have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable"    P. 69.  "Studies of humans...have shown that passing time in quiet rural settings, subjects were calmer and more perceptive, less depressed and anxious, with improved cognition and a stronger memory. Time amid the silence of nature, in others words, makes you smarter."  P. 114 (I rest my case! 😀 )  "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." P. 146.  Finkel's research, extensive, included interviewing prison inmates who had experienced extended solitary confinement. He also surveyed numerous health professionals about a medical diagnosis of Knight.

     The epigraph was particularly appropriate and resonated with me personally. "How many things there are I do not want." Socrates. My father, walking through a department store, "Look at all the things we don't need."

Takk for alt,

Al