My Take On The Outsider

The Outsider Through the writings and lives of some of the greatest and most creative figures of the past and the present, Colin Wilson, a college dropout, tries to explore and answer the question –What to do with one's life? He attempts to examine the striving of these men who inhabited a plane of intensity rarely reached and even more rarely understood by common people. Authors, philosophers, religious mystics, and painters: he covers them all in a bid to answer the question – what is a man's basic purpose in life, what must he do to understand it and to live accordingly. The book starts with men / characters who have uncontrollable impulses that remove them from the tepid world of the common folk. These men are not necessarily gifted; they just are (or become so due to some terrible experience that they have undergone) more intense, often seemingly neurotic. They cannot take life as it comes–eating, drinking, making merry, happy amidst trivial joys and lukewarm passions. Something bothers them night and day, making them misfits (or, as the author terms them, 'Outsiders') when it comes to the normal business of living out their lives. Page after page follows in which Wilson touches upon the writings of H.G. Wells, Sartre, Camus, Barbusse, Hemingway and a host of great thinkers and writers till he finally presents the problem these misfits are facing – their inner being is subconsciously craving for a more complete life and till they do not connect with what makes them tick, they are like lost souls, drifting aimlessly, torn and divided within themselves. They have woken up to the artificiality and unreality of their lives but are, as yet, not aware of what they can do to get in touch with their real selves. In desperation they cry out: what must we do to be saved? The book then shifts attention to the lives of some men who tried to grapple with the problem and thereby 'save' themselves. T.E. Lawrence, Van Gogh and Nijinsky are studied at some length as each tried to 'find his way back to himself' through the intellect, the emotions and the body respectively. Each failed despite strenuous efforts and the author states the reason in a subsequent chapter when he analyzes Dostoevsky's great book, ' The Brothers Karamazov' – the problem is one of self-expression and it cannot be solved if the mind, the heart and the body are not in unison. Having

covered all this, the book then analyzes the writings of Neitzche, Blake, Hess, Hemingway and others and comes to the conclusion that an Outsider's salvation lies in extremes because it is only when he is facing those extremes that he comes face to face with his real self and what his soul is actually craving for. Life cannot make sense till it is lived to the full and it is only when a man gives up the normal bourgeois way of living and engages in doing the 'one thing and the only thing' that he is made aware of the workings of his soul, of his most secret passions and his most intense desires. In short, he comes face to face with himself. A 'Vision' is vouchsafed him and then all he has to do is to cling to this Vision and let it guide him for the rest of his life. But for this to happen, he has to 'cleanse the doors of his perception' and often face terrible loneliness with only his inner ‘Will to Truth’ to give him company. Having once faced the extremes and derived the necessary lessons, an Outsider can then progress towards 'solving' his dilemmas and, if he remains committed, may well emerge as a prophet instead of remaining as a divided, tormented, dissatisfied soul. ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here?’ are questions that most men will not face even once in their lifetime but those who encounter them at one point or the other, cannot run away or ignore them for ever. Their lives would increasingly become more and more meaningless to them till they do not stop to confront their own souls and, when they do that, they'd realize that what separates them from the rest is that they see too much and too deep. All of us are moving with our eyes shut but the Outsider knows this while the others do not. Having once known this, he cannot rest in peace because he knows that the "real" world is not what his closed eyes have led him to believe it is. He opens his eyes and is immediately face to face with the confounding and terrifying reality: that he is damned like the rest of humanity unless he finds his true vocation in life and sticks to it, come what may.