The Essential Colin Wilson Read Online Free PDF Page A

royalties were correspondingly high—even enough to compensate for inflation. If The Occult didn't actually make me rich—few non-fiction books ever sell that well—it at least managed to give me a delightful sensation of not being permanently broke and overdrawn at the bank. It has also supported me during the six years I have taken to write a sequel, Mysteries, whose last chapter I have broken off to write this introduction . . .
    And how do I feel about The Outsider in retrospect? In order to answer that question I settled down the other day to re-read it—and found it impossible to gain a sense of perspective. It still produces in me the same feeling of excitement and impatience that I experienced as I sketched the outline plan on that Christmas Day of 1954. Why impatience? Because it aroused some enormous anticipation. At the same time, I mistook this for anticipation of success (for somehow, I never had the slightest doubt that it would be a success). Now I recognize it for what it was: the realization that I had at last settled down to the serious business of living: that after the long-drawn-out and messy years of childhood, and the teenage agonies of self-consciousness, I had at last ceased to waste my time; I was starting to do what I had always intended to do. There was a feeling like leaving harbour. It made no difference that the critics later tried to take back what they'd said about the book. They couldn't take back the passport they'd given me.

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
    From The Outsider , 1956

    At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem. He is the hole-in-corner man.
    In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.
    Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.
    In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed. It is not a woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one . . .
    This passage, from Henri Barbusse's novel L'Enfer , pinpoints certain aspects of the Outsider. His hero walks down a Paris street, and the desires that stir in him separate him sharply from other people. And the need he feels for a woman is not entirely animal either, for he goes on:
    Defeated, I followed my impulse casually. I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner. Then we walked side by side. We said a few words; she took me home with her . . . Then I went through the banal scene. It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.
    Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped. An immense confusion bewilders me. It is as if I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much.
    Throughout the book, this hero remains unnamed. He is the anonymous Man Outside.
    He comes to Paris from the country; he finds a position in a bank; he takes a room in a 'family hotel'. Left alone in his room, he meditates: He has 'no genius, no mission to fulfil, no remarkable feelings to bestow. I have nothing and I deserve nothing. Yet in spite of it, I desire some sort of recompense.' Religion . . . he doesn't care for it. 'As to philosophic discussions, they seem to me altogether meaningless. Nothing can be tested, nothing verified . Truth—what do they mean by it?' His thoughts range vaguely from a past love affair and its physical pleasures, to death: 'Death, that is the most important of all ideas.' Then back to his living problems: 'I must make money.' He notices a light high up on his wall; it is coming from the next room. He stands on the bed and looks through the spy-hole:
    I look, I see . . . The next room offers itself to me in its nakedness.
    The action of the novel begins. Daily, he stands on the bed and stares at the life that comes and goes in the next room. For the space of a month