The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? With the delusion of the screen identity gone, the causality of its events suddenly broken, they are confronted with a terrifying freedom.

Unfortunately, the problem is complicated by quite irrelevant human needs that claim the attention: for companionship and understanding, for a feeling of participation in the social life of humanity. And of course, for a roof over one’s head, and food and drink. The artist tries to give attention to these, but it is difficult when there are so much more important things to think about;

Moreover, that sense of accord is not the warm, vague harmony of a sleeping baby, but a blazing of all the senses, and a realization of a condition of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois.

Towards what? If he doesn’t want to be an Outsider, and he doesn’t want to be an ordinary well-adjusted social being, what the devil does he want to become?

What are we to say to this? What if the ‘brutal thunderclap of halt’ takes the form of the choice, Dishonesty or insanity? What use is honesty to an insane mind? Which of us would not choose dishonesty?

Ultimately, his reason informs him: you are not self-sufficient; you are futile, floating in a void. This is unanswerable.

He was getting tired of the everlasting pendulum that swung between Yes and No, of happiness that made him think misery unimportant, and misery that made happiness seem a delusion.

He asked himself: Is this true of the nature of life itself, or could a man exist who could say finally: I accept everything?

Compared to his own appetite for a purpose and a direction, the way most men live is not living at all; it is drifting.

What he is saying is, in effect, this: In most men, the instinct of brotherhood with other men is stronger—the herd instinct; in me, a sense of brotherhood with something other than man is strongest, and demands priority.

whose salvation lies in discovering his deepest purpose, and then throwing himself into it.

And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbé in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.

‘To hell with your System. I demand the right to behave as I like. I demand the right to regard myself as utterly unique.’