"What can be said
to characterize the
Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. This is the sense of
unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky."
"The ideal is the contemplative poet, the
'sage', who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him
alive, and never takes thought for the morrow."
The Outsider
Colin Wilson was hailed in the 1950s as one of the Angry Young Men
and as England's answer to Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and
Existentialism. By far his most influential and admired work is his
first, The Outsider,
written in The British Reading Room whilst Wilson
was living in a tent in Hampstead Heath and published in 1956. This
page is your
one-stop guide to Colin Wilson and The Outsider.
"What can be said
to characterize the
Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. This is the sense of
unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health
and strong
nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in
good health
is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where
the
uncertainty lies. And
once a man has seen
it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward
place.
Barbusse has shown us that the
Outsider is a mean who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world
of the
bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. "He sees too
deep and
too much", and what he sees is essentially chaos.
For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a
disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his
preoccupation
with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the
world is
not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the
face of
the bourgeois' complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock
a snook
at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that
the truth must be told at all
costs,
otherwise there can be no hope for
an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope,
truth
must be told. ... The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He
may have
no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the
Kabbala,
chaos—tohu
bohu—is
simply a state in which
order is latent; the egg is the "chaos" of the bird); in spite of this,
truth
must be told, chaos must be faced"
"All men should possess a
'visionary faculty'. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live
too tensely, under too much strain, 'getting and spending'. But this
loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man's fault, it is partly
the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend
a certain amount of their time 'getting and spending' to stay alive.
…The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they
are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck
of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If
these fail to do so, it is man's own fault for wasting his time and
energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the
'sage', who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him
alive, and never takes thought for the morrow."
