The Outsider
Authors: Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
The Outsider
1956
Broadbent
:
...
I find the world quite good enough for me—rather a jolly place, in fact.
Keegan
(looking at him with quiet wonder): You are satisfied?
Broadbent
:
As a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world—except of course, natural evils—that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.
Keegan
:
You feel at home in the world then?
Broadbent
:
Of course. Dont you?
Keegan
(from the very depths of his nature): No.
BERNARD SHAW
John Bul
l’
s
Other Island,
Act IV.
I
thank
the following for giving permission to quote extracts:
Cambridge University Press: George Sampson,
Concise Cambridge History of English Literature;
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Journals.
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Collected Poems;
Alexei Tolstoy,
The Death of Ivan llytch.
Doubleday & Company, Inc.:
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.:
A Buddhist Bible
edited by Dwight Goddard. Copyright, 1938, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.; The Everyman
’
s Library Edition of
The Idiot
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’
s Library Edition of
Letters from the Underworld
by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by C. J. Hogarth); The Everyman
’
s Library Edition of
Under Fire
by Henri Barbusse (translated by John Rodker).
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In Search of the Miraculous
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Speculations
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All and Everything.
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Collected Poems 1909-1935
by T. S. Eliot. Copyright, 1936, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.;
Selected Essays 1917-1932
by T. S. Eliot. Copyright, 1932, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. The above quotations are reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
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War and Peace
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“
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”
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Nietzsche;
Nietzsche,
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The Diary of Antoine Roquentin (Nausea).
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Sayings of the Buddha;
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Life of Tolstoy.
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’
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The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro,
“
Soldier
’
s Home,
”
“
In Another Country,
”
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The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio,
”
“
A Natural History of the Dead
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Death in the Afternoon);
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Axel
’
s Castle.
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A Treasury of Russian Literature
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Life of Shri Ramakrishna
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For
ANGUS WILSON
With Gratitude
The
OUTSIDER,
first published in 1956 when Colin Wilson was only twenty-four, is a prophetic book as well as a literary
tour de force.
By tracing, analyzing and giving a context to the disaffection and struggle of creative thinkers from William Blake to Ernest Hemingway, Wilson anticipated many developments of the 1960s and 1970s. The trajectory of Outsider consciousness led naturally to the rising interest in Eastern philosophy, the human potential movement, and the proliferation of techniques designed to help individuals transcend a sense of alienation from self and society. Wilson summarizes the problems of that alienation:
The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider.
He wants to be integrated as a human being, achieving a fusion between mind and heart.
He seeks vivid sense perception.
He wants to understand the soul and its workings.
He wants to get beyond the trivial.
He wants to express himself so he can better understand himself. He sees a way out via intensity, extremes of experience.
Surveys and polls in the United States reveal Outsider values in a significant and rapidly growing minority of the population. The
“
inner-directed
”
are the fastest-growing consumer group. Increasingly people say that meaning is a more important consideration in their work than economic incentives. Self-fulfillment and self-expression are high on the list of goals.
The atmosphere of conformity that made the Outsiders feel different from their peers is now under attack from the mainstream. Social norms are changing rapidly in the direction of greater personal freedom.
Those seeking the experiential, the spiritual, and the numinous are no longer a handful. Millions have recognized that they are harboring within themselves another dimension of consciousness and that many old social structures are deadly to this other self. The phenomenon Blake called
“
twofold consciousness
”
has become an increasingly common experience.
To an observer the way of the Outsider may appear excessive, difficult, even reckless. Wilson shows us, by example after example, why the Outsider cannot accept society as it is, why he
“
sees too much and too deep.
”
Outsiders seek to heal divisions: between conscious and unconscious, intellect and intuition, mind and body, self and society, spirit and sensuality.
“
The Outsider
’
s chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.
”
Refusing to resolve life
’
s difficulties by withdrawal or denial, Outsiders seek transcendence through headlong involvement. They believe with Hermann Hesse
’
s Steppenwolf that
“
the way to innocence leads ... ever deeper into human life. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.
”
The Outsider
’
s intensity is expressed in Goethe
’
s poem,
“
The Holy Longing,
”
with its image of the butterfly drawn to, and transformed by, the flame:
And so long as you haven
’
t experienced this: to die and so
O
grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Most of us accommodate to the cultural trance, but Outsiders continue to be appalled at inauthenticity and mechanicalness. They see through their own act and that of others.
“
The problem of the Outsiders is the unreality of their lives. They suddenly realize they are in a cinema. They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? ... They are confronted with a terrifying freedom.
”
Because they have glimpsed another, deeper dimension to life,
they are not satisfied to be automatons. They are driven to self-discovery, even self-inquisition. They put themselves to tests of
imagination and action that awe more
‘
sensible
’
people.
“
I doubt
whether such pain improves us,
”
Nietzsche said,
“
but I know it
deepens
us.
”
And Rilke wrote,
“
May I, emerging at last from this
terrible insight, burst into jubilant praise
.”
The Outsider, Wilson points out, does not wish to accept life merely because fate is treating him well at the moment
but because it is his Will to accept.
He wants to control his responses through understanding, to build affirmation into his vision. Freedom of response is the only authentic freedom. This search is essentially
spiritual, but
“
religious truth cannot exist apart from intellectual rigor.
”
The Outsider
’
s stubborn intellect seeks to understand the whispers of his intuition.
For a hundred years or more, Wilson said, Outsiders have been slowly creating new values by implication.
“
The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love
words
or by men who love
living.
”
A thoughtful reading of
The Outsider
gives us a profound sense of our collective modern struggle: how to restore the timeless and visionary in a culture that has prided itself on divorcing reason from feeling. Understanding the historic roots of this struggle gives us a deeper understanding of the Outsider in ourselves.
—Marilyn Ferguson
Los Angeles, 1981