The Man Who Chose Silence: Fifty Years Alone in the Amazon

✍️ Radhakrishnan Dutta   

For more than fifty years, a man lived alone in the depths of the Amazon rainforest, without a name, without a tribe, without a voice heard by another human being. Known to the outside world as the Man of the Hole, he survived in silence after his people were wiped out by the intrusions of civilisation. This essay traces his solitary life alongside a fictional counterpart—Michael K—and reflects on isolation, speechlessness, and the fragile boundary between the self and the world.

  

    Deep inside the mighty Amazon rainforest lived a man – his name unknown. In fact there was no address, no family history and recorded contact of this man with the outside world. He belonged to one of the hundreds of uncontacted tribes still living inside the Amazon jungle, their homelands for thousands of years, existing side by side with Mother Nature. They lived in thatched huts; they hunted and gathered food; they practised rudimentary farming; they explored the unknown depths of their world – the woods and their mysteries.

    It was in the 1970s. This man belonged to a tribe known as the Tanaru Indians to the outside world, to the observers of FUNAI — the organisation tasked by the Brazilian government with protecting the still surviving indigenous peoples. Their homelands of thousands of years had been breached and battered by the modern world. Encroachments, wood cutting, mining, and trafficking had brought them in conflict with an enemy they had never seen before in their collective memory. In one of these conflicts, this unknown man’s tribe was annihilated. His kith and kin, his friends and neighbours, his culture — all vanished within a few hours on that night. But, he survived, hiding from the unknown devil and his fire-breathing weapon. From that fateful night onwards, he lived in flight and in isolation, in silence. His already limited world—without any knowledge beyond the jungle: civilisation, modernity, technology, politics, complex societies—had always been a cloistered space from a prehistoric era. From that night, he embraced this timeless isolation in his soul. Over fifty languorous years, drifting like a slowly decaying leaf, he dug holes across his secluded hermit kingdom, changing abodes from one hole to another in fear of being seen. There were moments, he would step out of his hideouts, furtively walk into the deeper woods and forage using his prehistoric spear that he had already cut from a tree using the knowledge inherited from his ancestors. This unknown man, popularly known as the Man of the Hole, in the media that had come to know about his existence, would go on to live up to 2022 in isolation– without any social interaction, without speaking his unknown language to a human soul, without participating in his tribal ceremonies or in any communal dance or in a social feast or in communal prayers to his mysterious gods. He lived there, moving from one hole to another, entirely by himself throughout this long, long span of time. A deep sea, all alone – a Santiago wandering in profound loneliness, he talked to the birds, to the trees, to the spirit of isolation itself.

    There was another man, a fictional one – Michael K. He is a character in J.M Coetzee’s Booker Prize- winning novel Life and Times of Michael K. Michael fled from persecution and violence in the civilized world to take shelter in isolation. On an abandoned farm, he dug a hole, away from the ferocity of regulations, permits, weapons and overall, a political civilisation. He rebelled against time -- sweet time; the most precious resource of civilization. He became timeless in his hole, cultivating pumpkins in the silence of dark nights and turning nocturnal. Those nights became the only brief moments of freedom for him: freedom in solitary existence and speechlessness.

   

     This is me who is speaking to you now. There is a story called Blow-Up by Julio Cortazar. In it, the “I” becomes “He”. This “I” speaking here can also become “He”. There are moments -- many such moments when he feels the call of isolation. A spell of nonchalance, a carelessness engulfs the “I” who is also “he”. He wishes to lose himself -- to nothingness, to isolation, to speechlessness. The world is a responsibility that burdens him. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, says that the “I” asserts itself only by referring to what I am not. Absolute negation--that is, what I am not -- is the only essence of my existence as a being. Maybe in isolation, in silence, in reclusion away from everything of civilisation, “I” and “He” find the true self.

  

     Lastly, the Man of the Hole died in 2022. FUNAI found him dead in the most recent hole he had dug. Media reports say he died naturally, dressed in ceremonial garbs, with wild flowers decorating his body. As if he had been waiting for something. As if he were finally relieved. As if he had finally become the true self. He vanished into the silence -- the speechless freedom of the woods.