He famously said to a friend (he did have friends), “What interests me are my little soul’s endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body.” Appropriately, his first and semiautobiographical novel, Hunger (1890), was a barely plotted, proto-stream-of-consciousness, first-person account of a hungry young literary man in Oslo, who can’t eat because he can’t write and can’t write because he can’t eat-an artist too hungry to make art. From the black skies and cold fjords and deep valleys of his youth, he conjured a no-less-than-revolutionary aesthetic of inwardness. In his late twenties and early thirties-decades before he became a fascist, and when he wrote his best books-he was fanatically dedicated to the literary potential of introspection. Hamsun was an eccentric autodidact whose childhood, much of which he spent north of the Arctic Circle with an uncle who beat him, would make Marcus Aurelius sad. Glahn, a young man, feels happy when alone in the woods. How I envy Lieutenant Glahn, the narrator of Hamsun’s lyrical novel, Pan (1894). “My mind’s not right,” wrote Robert Lowell, whose mind wasn’t right, in “Skunk Hour.” A few lines later: “I myself am hell.” Exactly. To mosey through the woods is to mosey along a road of rakes toward the moldy basement of my mind, where things aren’t right. (My psychiatrist has in fact advised me to stop taking walks alone in the woods and instead find a more social form of exercise.) But pines only appeal to me when I pine for them in the city, especially when riding the subway beside a man who flosses his teeth and flicks plaque on my cheek.

Some people say they like to wander the woods because it helps them get out of their heads.

If thoughts are rakes, which they aren’t but no matter, then introspecting in the woods is like stepping on a rake and having it smash my face, then stepping on another rake and having it smash my face and so forth. Unlike Hamsun, I find it painful to introspect, especially in the woods. Knut Hamsun, the misanthropic Norwegian writer who in 1920 won the Nobel Prize for literature and who later suicided his reputation by eulogizing Hitler, renders the joy of introspecting alone in the woods so convincingly that sometimes, during bad moods, I wish I understood firsthand how it feels to hate other people (without becoming a Nazi) as much as he did, purely so that I could enjoy solitude.

Pan de knut hamsun