Colin Wilson

In most men, the conscious and the unconscious being hardly ever make contact; consequently the conscious aim is to make himself as comfortable as possible with as little effort as possible. But there are other men, whom we have been calling, for convenience, ‘Outsiders’, whose conscious and unconscious being keep in closer contact, and the conscious mind is forever aware of the urge to care about ‘more abundant life’, and care less about comfort and stability and the rest of the notions that are so dear to the bourgeois.

The outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache.

The Outsider's miseries are the prophet's teething pains. He retreats into his room, like a spider in a dark corner; he lives alone, wishes to avoid people.

There certainly is self division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.

The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.

The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression.

These men traveling down to the City in the morning, reading their newspapers or staring at advertisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt of who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for corn-plasters, Elliot's lines: We are the hollow men

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.