by
Colin Wilson(1)
What a fine book. It is beautifully written, logical in its development, and penetrating as to its subject. Its subject is the Outsider, a personality type.
I first read the book in the fall of 1968. I had just broken up with one of my girlfriends, had hitch-hiked to East Lansing, Michigan to begin my fourth year of study for a Ph.D. in mathematics, had rented a basement for $25.00 a month. I crawled into that hole, sleeping on a mattress I had found on the side of the road, feeling as if I were dead. There was no furniture in the basement except a chair, the mattress on a bit of raised concrete, and a single light bulb. It was cold and occasionally sewage from the pipes would appear in one corner, but I felt safe on the raised concrete. I did nothing but read, teach my math classes, come home, read some more, and sink further into a darkness that had steadily been gaining strength for some years.
The Outsider made a profound impression. I was an Outsider. The feelings, thoughts, impressions, and even some of the actions of the Outsider, were mine. The book described a number of Outsiders, some were actual persons, while others were portrayed in works of fiction by writers such as Dostoevsky, Camus, Hemmingway, and Hesse. I had already read a number of these works of fiction. As the book by Wilson progressed, I began to notice that most of the Outsiders did not survive their condition. One way or another, they succumbed to the darkness. By the time I finished the book, I felt as if I were doomed. I noticed that there had been a few that had escaped, and most of them like Blake and Gurdjieff, were religious visionaries. For me, however, that alternative seemed impossible. I started reading Gurdjieff, but could hardly understand him. In the end, I crawled out of the hole temporarily by getting married, but that was only a delaying tactic. With the advent of my "political phase," a possibility that seemed utterly fantastic in terms of solving fundamental problems, my darkness became even more hideous, as the suffering of the world poured into my soul, a "solution" suggested by one Outsider, Hesse's Steppenwolf. That was an abyss, almost the final one.
My next step is to characterize the Outsider, and then discuss the Outsider problem in light of that characterization and my own journey out of the darkness into light. Here are some of the characteristics of the Outsider as described by Wilson.
1. The Outsider is tormented by the sense that all is unreal. He feels dead and desperately attempts to rouse himself to life. Danger, intense sensations, flashes of beauty, can made him briefly feel alive. Some years after reading The Outsider, I read Hemmingway's Death in the Afternoon, a commentary on bullfighting. He described a flashing moment when the Matador's sword laid bare the clean, white bone of the bull's shoulder bone before it was covered with squirting blood. At that moment, Hemmingway, if I read him correctly, felt alive.
2. For the Outsider, life has no meaning. It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. One of the first novels I read that communicated this was Camus' The Stranger (also discussed by Wilson). I read this some years before reading The Outsider, and I remember clearly the feeling of emptiness that permeated the book and my soul. Once, when about sixteen, I asked my brother Jack about the possibility that we might come to disbelieve in God. He replied that if we did not believe in God, then for all practical purposes, there was no God. This was a strange argument, but behind it all was the sense that there was nothing there, no final truth.
3. In spite of the fact that the Outsider feels as if there is nothing there, he is haunted at times by a desire to know Truth. This feeling makes no sense to him. He becomes restless, agitated, tormented by contrary impulses. A useless passion. There is no truth, yet there must be, for why does he feel so tormented?
4. The Outsider sees things that other people do not see or want to see. When I was in college, I was amazed that other students could tell me their views on various subjects, some of which they held with great conviction. It was obvious to me that they were simply parroting what they had been told from childhood onward. They believed all sorts of things, things I knew that others disbelieved, and they acted as if their beliefs were perfectly clear and obvious. How they could fail to see the relativity of all knowledge, or fail to see that they had been conditioned, was strange to me, but stranger still, was a growing sense that there was no truth to be had by anyone anywhere. The result was a sense of unreality and growing estrangement.
5. Outsiders long for relationship, but like the character from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (also discussed by Wilson), once a relationship occurs, he can find no happiness because, deep inside, he feels like he is a worm, a cockroach, a nothing. Something like love requires a soul, an inner substance, and to pretend to love without substance becomes unbearable. There are, however, exceptions, and long before I read Colin Wilson, I read Dostoevsky's The Possessed, one of the greatest novels of my youth, along with The Brothers Karamazov. Wilson discusses both of these novels as examples of the Outsider problem. In The Possessed I met Stavrogen, who toyed with the heart of a young crippled girl, pretending to love, and Kirilov, who committed suicide to prove his ultimate freedom in a universe without God. Stavrogen repelled me, but logically, why should the instinct of compassion rule our hearts, and frankly, I always thought the humanistic arguments for morality utterly devoid of compelling logic.
6. Outsiders are tormented by their minds, they think incessantly, and their thinking devours them. They cannot get around their thinking, and it becomes a disease. They want to establish a connection with their bodies, with their instincts, and I found this beautifully expressed in Hemmingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Wilson notes this as well. There are moments in that novel of pure physical reality, but only moments. By and large, however, Outsiders cannot escape their minds, and their minds vitiate their natural powers, leaving them lifeless.
7. Outsiders try various strategies to escape and Wilson describes those strategies. Intense experience is the one that seemed most promising to me, although I could not see how experience could prove anything since any experience could be abrogated tomorrow by a different experience with a different outcome. Some Outsiders recommended taking the whole world into their souls, which is a recipe for insanity because no one can withstand the world's suffering. Others enter into their bodies, Nijinksy being the example discussed by Wilson. That also seemed a good alternative to me, for in the moment of intense physical experience, sex, swimming in freezing lakes, lying by the railroad tracks as the trains roared by and the ground trembled beneath my body, everything would suddenly disappear, leaving only the moment itself, but only for the moment. Even then, as in the act of sex, my body felt like an appendage to my mind. The appendage would provide the intense sensations which, for the moment would leave my mind at peace. Some, like Hemmingway, embraced the physical, the body, and danger which can enliven the body and soul. Others, like Van Gogh, used art or poetry, but I was not an artist nor a poet, although I did like to dance like Nijinsky. I would get up in the morning and put a record on my record player (I especially liked Hutie Leadbetter), and dance and dance and dance. Others would attempt great, mad things, like T.E. Lawrence liberating the Arabs, or Nietzsche's attempt to overcome the world. Others became visionaries, but that did not seem to me an alternative that could be created, like art or poetry, and even then, how does one know the vision is real? And, as I would sometimes think after I became a Christian, what difference does it make, in the greater scheme of things, if an alienated person has intense experiences of God while the rest of the wretched world sinks down into death and sorrow?
These are some of the fundamental issues discussed by Colin Wilson in his brilliant book, The Outsider. Obviously, I am still alive, I am not crazy, and the remainder of this review will describe my response to the issues raised by The Outsider.
First, there is nothing that can logically be used to prove anything. Even the most intense experiences, in my case encounters with God as fire and intense perceptions of love in the Holy Eucharist, does not prove that God exists, or that I am saved, or that Scripture is true, or that all the things affirmed by the Christian faith, or any other faith for that matter, are true. Finite minds and limited experience cannot demonstrate ultimate matters. All thinking is based upon experience, and no experience is decisive because all experiences can be countermanded by subsequence experience.
Furthermore, the mind turns upon itself, and if given free rein, will devour itself which is what was happened to me and other Outsiders. It undermines everything, and if something is done, or recognized, or perceived, faith is required. Faith is always required. Even Kirilov had faith. He though he could prove his freedom from a non-existent God by taking his life. But that proves nothing. Whatever position we take, even if we believe nothing, takes faith, because nothing we believe or disbelieve can decisively be verified. Therefore, we begin with faith, and since we think, this faith has an intellectual component. The only way out is death and even that is not certain. We might continue after death and find ourselves thinking even more than we do now.
Therefore, when I became a Christian, I asked Jesus to reveal himself to me, and he did. The fact that he revealed himself to me does not prove that he exists, or that I encountered him, or anything along those lines. Although his existence cannot be proved with absolute certainty, he exists, however, like other things that can be experienced. I believe this room exists because I experience it. Over the next few months I may be slowly weaned from my believe in the existence of this room by having experiences that show it to be an illusion, and these in turn may be an illusion as well. In the end, we cannot escape our finitude. My only point here is that faith in the Lord Jesus is not faith in something that cannot be experienced. Christ can be experienced, and until something disproves my experience, which I doubt will happen, I will continue to believe in and trust him.
Secondly, Christ casts our demons. These demons created the devastating Outsider experiences I had from my childhood onward. One night, in absolute agony, I ran down to the church, fell before the altar, and was delivered of a terrible demon. It came out of me with a scream. When I stood up a few moments later, I looked down at myself and was shocked to see how clean, tall, and fair I looked. A sequence of images poured through my mind, beginning in childhood, games in which I pretended to be a monster, images of monsters that I had seen, images that had resonated in my soul, memories of utter ugliness, and I knew in a instant that I had been delivered of a demon that gave me a deep sense of ugliness, self-hate, and inner loathing. Another time I was delivered of a terrible demon that had energized images of universal destruction which had caused me to take the suffering of the world into my soul. This spirit of universal devastation entered me when I was a child. I had been fascinated by war, the Korean War, and later, wars of all kinds, especially the Hitler movement and Genghis Khan. Another time I was delivered of a terrible spirit what cut my soul off from my body. This one is difficult to explain, but once it was gone, my soul diffused itself into my body so that my body was no longer an appendage to my mind.
It is assumed by many that the Christian religion has a negative view of the body, and under the influence of Greek thought, western Christianity has denigrated the body. The incarnation, however, affirms the body, and once the evil spirit that disembodied me was gone, the center of my being moved from right behind my eyes, concentrated in endless, futile thinking, into my chest where my soul resides today. I am a centered force, and my mind does not consume my soul or my body. Further, physical things meant for pleasure bring pleasure, such as sex, food, the sky, beauty, all those things that pour into the soul through the senses, and the joy of them is felt throughout my body, my soul, and delights the mind. That is a Christian affirmation, one recognized by C. S. Lewis. We are made for joy, including physical joy and the joy of happy personal relationships. Among the things that pour into my body and soul through my senses are impressions of God -- God as waves of love mediated by sacramental realities, above all, the Holy Eucharist. I have described this experience on this website, above all, in my novel, and this needs no further comment except to say that the Outsiders described by Wilson also experienced spiritual realities given through the senses. Nietzsche experienced a rush of intoxication given in a thunderstorm, Hemmingway in the experience of the bullring, Nijinsky in the ecstasy of the dance, Van Gogh as he painted the starry night. All these physical realities communicated spiritual realities of many different kinds. For many Outsiders, the spiritual realities were emptiness, boredom, loneliness, suffering, and the "horror." They are spiritual in the sense that they cannot avoid a universal, transcendent element. When looking at Van Gogh's "Starry Night," one can sense the transcendent, a form of universal, brooding fire. Nietzsche made his sense of exhilaration given in a thunderstorm an element in the Dionysian aspect of life. Hemmingway affirmed a transcendent emptiness by having For Whom the Bell Tolls end with the death of Robert Jordan. When I was in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the fall of 1969 and having sensations of doom mediated through the sky, there was something cosmic about these sensations. Whether we wish it or not, the human soul, even the dead, dry soul, cannot help but sense universal possibilities. Camus' stranger, one of the most barren souls of all, experienced an epiphany at the end of the novel. Human beings are spiritual, and they cannot help but communicate ultimate realities, even if it is a sense of cosmic emptiness.
Nor can human beings avoid meaning. It is inevitable. When I first read Hemmingway's, For Whom the Bell Tolls, I was in my second year of graduate school in mathematics. What was the meaning of that novel? I could seen no meaning, except that we die, and in life, there are brilliant, piercing moments that haunt us. But why do they haunt us? Why did Robert Jordan, the principle character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, find happiness in a woman? Why was there a sense of desolation at the end when he died, providing a delaying action for his comrades in arms? Why was M. C. Snopes' life so tragic? He was a nobody, conned by his cousin Flem to spend most of his life in jail, and why did Faulkner end his trilogy with M. C. Snopes lying down to die, and yet, taking his place among the graceless seraphim? Why are these things so beautiful? C. S. Lewis was right. He saw it clearly. His argument, not exactly a proof, is that all desires can be fulfilled, and all human beings want meaning, and all want heaven. We want it, and if we don't have it or cannot find it, we create works in which emptiness is given a sense of transcendence. It seems to me, that if we believe in nothing and are honest about it, we should create nothing, just live day to day like a slug. My life has meaning. I was created by God, redeemed by Christ, and destined for heaven where my small contribution will be celebrated. Whether this is true or not, only time will tell, and perhaps not even them. All is is faith, and all have faith without exception.
According to Wilson, Outsiders see more deeply than other people. They have some awful, special quality that sets them apart as loners, and they are loners because they can scarcely bear to listen to what passes for wisdom among the learned. To be honest, I have often felt that way at times. The worst experiences were clergy meetings. In my view, the clergy had been brainwashed by their theological education, and the result was to insure that we never encountered God. It seemed to me that, as far as God was concerned, we were in over our heads. Even so, the common response was not to acknowledge that fact, but to create a never-ending stream of programs, insights, and techniques whose goal was to create church growth and bring in the Kingdom. This could be quite painful. Presumably we believed God created his Kingdom, but the latest "wisdom" almost always appeared to me to be a way to protect ourselves against the real Kingdom. I came to believe that all of us, myself included, were swimming around in the darkness, although I knew this only because I experienced moments of piercing light as living love. When that happened I saw clearly how all things came together in God, and apart from that, we were ignorant and blind. I couldn't help but think that if we started from that premise, not just an intellectual ascent, but existential insight into our real condition, we might get somewhere.
But I do think that Outsiders see things others do not see, and I think I have seen things others have not seen, good things as well as the evil. But having said this, there is a line from the Psalms that speaks to this matter, "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God" (Psalm 84:3). Which is to say, when God appears in the sanctuary, I am like a sparrow among the rafters, and before the throne, are the multitudes of heaven, and I am one of them, no different than the rest, for our faces are radiant at the vision of the one who dwells between the cherubim. So, in the final analysis, if I see things others do not see, it is only a temporary arrangement. It will not last long if what I see is true. And if what I see is an illusion, then I do not really see.
What, according to Wilson, do these Outsiders see? They see many things. Some, like Blake, Traherne, and the Indian mystic, Ramakrishna, see God, the divine, or the ecstatic unity of all things as love. Most, however, at least the ones discussed by Wilson, see the abyss, the horror of life, the utter futility of existence. They see the stupidity of the daily grind, the petty ridiculous pleasures of the "common" man, the foolish fantasies human beings concoct to give themselves a modicum of happiness, or the absurd "ideals" they use to justify the most horrifying atrocities, ideals such as "freedom," "democracy," the "white man's burden," the "classless society," the "Fatherland," or the necessity of temporary evils for long-term good, such as bleeding capital out of the bodies of the poor, eliminating the "capitalists roaders," or sacrificing children to Moloch. According to Wilson, Outsiders see through these illusions which are around us, especially in the areas of politics and religion. Everyone, and this became clear to me when I was an Outsider, wraps himself in fantasies to justify their having the largest piece of the pie.
There is, however, a further point to be made. What Outsiders saw, and here I draw on my own experience, was only a subset of what can be seen, and that subset is selected by spirit, whether evil spirits or the Holy Spirit. When the demons were cast out of me, my perceptions changed. Prior to the exorcisms, I generally saw people as selfish, narrow-minded, and often more evil than good. After the exorcisms, I saw them, not so much as evil, but rather as broken, wanting to do good, but weighed down by darkness that, for the most part, they did not create. I became much more compassionate because I knew from my own experience that they did not have the power to overcome the evil within them. I saw more clearly the good that was in them, and although this good was often thwarted, it was still quite active in most people. Only a few people have given themselves over to evil willingly.
Furthermore, prior to the deliverances, the words and actions of others would trigger responses in me, and these responses had a transcendent or spiritual component, making them appear to be more powerful, or seductive, or hostile, than they really were. After the exorcisms, there was less intensity associated with other people. People, myself included, appeared more human, finite, and ordinary. This made life much more peaceful. The problem with many Outsiders is that they are looking for relief while being bombarded by evil thoughts and impulses. Many of them live in a form of hell. Prior to the exorcisms, I was capable of relating to only a few people, normally alienated intellectuals. After the exorcisms, I began to relate to all sorts of people because I was no longer intensifying them into good or evil, those I could relate to and those I could not, and further, I saw that virtually everyone was looking for the same thing that I was, namely love.
The Outsiders discussed by Wilson were gifted individuals, especially gifted in poetic imagination. As Outsiders, they explored the Outsider problem in their arts -- writers such as Hemmingway, Hesse, Dostoevsky, and Camus, or artists like Van Gogh, or intellectuals who lived relentlessly like T. E. Lawrence. In part, these men saw more deeply because they had intellectual gifts, and many of them had the privilege of education and travel. Given their abilities and education, there is nothing unusual about their deeper insight, although they had one other quality that I think important -- they were ruthlessly honest. This is not to say that they did not tell lies like the rest of us, but rather, they were willing to look at what appeared real to them. With poetic insight, they could, for example, see quite clearly that a great deal of religion is simply conventional morality and self-seeking dressed up as the divine will, or that political programs publicly proclaimed as a benefit for the masses are really for the wealthy few, or that wars for democracy and freedom are really land grabs for oil. There are people who know these things, but Outsiders see this and something more. They see, and this is true of the darker ones, that these hypocrisies are futile, that even if the naive fool themselves and the cynical get what they want, this still will not solve the fundamental Outsider problem, that life has no meaning, whether in religion, politics, or otherwise.
One of the weaknesses of Wilson's book is that it does not give much insight into how Outsiders became Outsiders. Were they born that way? Is it a cultural phenomenon? However that question is answered, Wilson did not address it. His Outsiders were simply presented and this gave the impression that being an Outsider is something like a fact of nature -- some people are Outsiders and some are not. I would want to say, however, that being an Outsider is a mix of many factors such as temperament, socialization, and spiritual realities. By temperament, the Outsiders discussed by Wilson were gifted and artistic. By socialization, they lived at a time when the West had lost its story, the Christian story that had guided the West for some 1500 years. Without a story, there is no meaning. As the Christian story collapsed, other stories took its place, the various political stories such as Fascism, communism, and "democratic" capitalism, as well as religious stories such as the functional paganism that animates so many Westerners, Christian and non-Christian, together with other religions, and finally, "anti-stories," the belief that there is no sacred or secular canopy that makes sense of things. Everybody has some form of story, or more commonly, fragments of stories, events, and feelings that are amalgamated together, and these illuminate the world. But it is not simply a matter of story, there is spirit, and this is not widely recognized. All stories or lack thereof are animated by spirits. Outsiders became Outsiders by temperament, by living in a spiritual vacuum without a compelling story, and by being infected, if my example is relevant, by spirits that blocked them from certain stories and animated other words and images. By virtue of their being creative, Outsiders even created their own stories, and Wilson has described their reports. In light of story and spirit, however, being an Outsider is not an accident of birth, nor is it a fixed condition as one might conclude from reading Wilson. We can be changed, converted. Even in the examples Wilson gave of persons who were converted, such as George Fox, one gets the impression that Fox was converted because he was of a particular religious type all along. Granted that not all are like George Fox, or need to be, but when the opportunity is given, we are free to choose what story we wish to believe and which to disbelieve, and further, we can accept the spirits that have come to us, or we can be delivered of them in the name of Jesus and receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit who makes Christ real to us as the biblical story. Both are required for a story to become alive, and the fact that many people encounter the biblical story and find nothing does not imply the story is empty, but rather, the story is being read with the wrong spirit. In fact, a goodly portion of biblical scholarship for the past 200 years is generated by a spirit alien to the gospel. In this regard the church has often read Scripture by the spirit of death, and further, failed to deliver its members from evil in the name of Jesus. When Outsiders see a dead church, they know they are seeing a wasteland where they should see God.
Further, from this perspective, the difference between an Outsider and other people is not absolute, but rather, one of degree. I have known many people with limited education and little academic interest or creative ability, yet they have been touched by the holy as have Blake, or Fox, or Traherne. Their contact may not have been as intense, nor do they express it as readily in language, but it is the same reality. In fact, within the body of Christ, we would be like Gulliver among the mathematicians, so obsessed by their theorems that they forgot to eat and properly attire themselves, if all Christians were as mystically inclined as Blake or Coleridge. Within the body, all gifts are important, and it is unwise to value one above another. The words of Jesus are relevant here, "The last shall be first and the first last," which, to my mind is a caution against assuming the conventional hierarchies. At times, when reading Wilson, I had the impression that he thought there was something special about the Outsiders and their deep insight and poetical abilities. Well, in one sense, they are unique; they have their gift. But in another sense, they aren't unique; everyone is given gifts.
Finally, what has been the outcome of this life with Christ? Has it been what the Outsiders would call mind suicide? the adoption of a middle class, bourgeois life? At this moment, with house and car, my life looks like a petty, bourgeois life. On the other hand, is following Jesus a petty bourgeois life? Is it not difficult? Where did he end up? And is it not true that all the Christian talk about how God prospers believers can never hide the fact that our leader died on a cross? Why are we still alive? Could it be that we are still alive because we never really lived the Christian life? Is it not possible that, if we had really followed him, we would end where he did? Even what little living I have done has been difficult enough, a brutal struggle just to do the simplest things, love my wife and children, speak truthfully, be ruthlessly honest with myself, stand up for truth when lies come my way, and in the end, give up success, culturally defined of course, and adopt a life of relative obscurity, even though, apparently, I should have something to say having "seen more than others," although what I have seen can be readily taken from the Bible by anyone who wants to believe. Is that a petty bourgeois life? The purpose of the petty bourgeois life is to avoid suffering, and that is the purpose of a lot of religion, including the Christian religion as commonly practiced. But that is not the purpose of following Jesus. Anyone who really wants to try it, will soon see what I mean.
In sum, the mind bends back upon itself, forcing itself to acknowledge faith, and further, we are spiritual beings, we cannot help ourselves. As spiritual beings, were are driven by spirits, and there are many of them that drive us. There is also the Holy Spirit who teaches us the love of God made manifest in Christ Jesus, and there are other spirits, who take us to places inhabited by Outsiders.
Once, years ago, when I was an Outsider and an agnostic, I read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. At one point the monster was peering through the chinks of the wall into the house of some very poor people. There he discovered something he had never experienced before. They loved each other, and as he glimpsed it, his heart broke. Suddenly, I burst into tears. That seems to be the fundamental question. Do you want to be loved, or do you want to remain a monster? Some years before that, in high school, I read The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham. In this story a crippled boy prays over and over again to be healed, and he is never healed. To me, it is a total mystery that his prayer was not answered as prayed, and I have wondered about it for years. Lots of Christians give all sorts of answers, the doctrine of election being a common one, but I refuse to give an answer. I don't fully understand this passage, " ... ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened" (Luke 11:9-10). I believe it, but I do not fully understand it. But then, why not try it? Do we know the end of the story beyond The Razor's Edge? Do we know what happened to the little boy who prayed over and over again? We do not. So ask yourself a question: "Do you or do you not want to be loved? If you do, why not seek Jesus who, "having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1).
Endnote
1. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. Boston: Haughton Mifflin Company, 1956.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
Feast of St. John the Baptist, 2011
