2010/24

Colin Wilson: The Outsider (281p.)

Colin Wilson’s primary concern when he wrote The Outsider at age 24 (it brought him instant fame) wasn’t style (based upon The Outsider, I’d be rather reluctant to sample some of his fictional writing), but bringing a message across, which he does by throwing his readers in at the deep end, and by setting a torrid pace up until the last chapter, where it all ends as abruptly as it started.

In essence, The Outsider is an overview of 250 years of Existential Philosophy, which Wilson traces through the writings, and even more importantly, through the lives (actually lived) of ‘outsiders’ like Hesse, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Lawrence (of Arabia), Blake, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and others.

The question is of course how to live successfully under the existential cloud. Wilson answers the question by rigorously examining the various solutions proffered (by the men above), discarding romanticism, humanism, classicism, religion, science, and finally retaining various shades of mysticism, as displayed in the writings and lives of Kierkegaard, Ramakrishna, Gurdjieff, and Hulme.

Very good.

But there are other men, whom we have been calling, for convenience, ‘Outsiders’, whose conscious and unconscious being keep in closer contact, and the conscious mind is forever aware of the urge to care about ‘more abundant life’, and care less about comfort and stability and the rest of the notions that are so dear to the bourgeois. I have tried to show in the course of this book how the Outsider’s one need is to discover how to lend a hand to the forces inside him, to help them in their struggle. And obviously, if he is only vaguely aware of these interior forces, the sensible thing is to become more aware of them and find out what they are aiming at. The Outsider usually begins by saying, ‘I must have solitude to look inside myself’; hence the room on his own.