The Essential Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson Page A

was exactly what I had been afraid of: I found myself losing the preoccupations that had led me to write The Outsider .
    Strangers who claimed to be Outsiders wrote me long letters explaining their symptoms and asking for advice, until I began to suspect parody. In this whirl, I discovered that I ceased to be aware of the states of consciousness that lie beyond my ordinary two or three notes. In my own terminology, I had started to become an Insider.
    I record this because it is of central importance to the theme of this book. Most men I know live like this as a matter of course: working, travelling, eating and drinking and talking. The range of everyday activity in a modern civilization builds a wall around the ordinary state of consciousness and makes it almost impossible to see beyond it. The conditions under which we live do this to us. It is what happens in a civilization that always makes a noise like a dynamo, and gives no leisure for peace and contemplation. Men begin to lose that intuition of 'unknown modes of being,' that sense of purpose, that makes them more than highly efficient pigs. This is the honour the Outsider revolts against.
    Some years ago, in Winchester Cathedral, I came across a pamphlet by Mr T. S. Eliot; it was an address which Mr Eliot had delivered in the Cathedral, and it had the unpromising title: 'On the Use of Cathedrals in England'. For three quarters of the pamphlet, Mr Eliot talks like a studious country parson about the relation of the cathedral to the parish churches. And then, towards the end, he speaks of the position of the dean and chapter, and his pamphlet suddenly becomes an impassioned plea for leisure in a modern civilization. He attacks the view that the dean and chapter should be general runabouts, preaching sermons all over the parish, and emphasizes that good theological thinking requires quiet and contemplation. He adduces his own example to strengthen his point: he has always worked as a publisher to give himself the necessary leisure for writing, and any permanent value which his work may possess (he modestly claims) is due to the fact that he wrote only what he wanted to write, under no compulsion to please anyone but himself.
    I remember being excited by this at the time. T. E. Lawrence had made the same point in The Seven Pillars : '. . . of these two poles, leisure and subsistence, we should shun subsistence . . . and cling close to leisure . . . Some men there might be, uncreative, whose leisure is barren; but the activity of these would have been material only . . . Mankind has been no gainer by its drudges.'
    For my own part, I found that I preferred working as a navvy or washing dishes to life in an office; for although I had no more than the normal reluctance to face hard work, I had a very real fear of that deadening of the nerves and sensibilities that comes of boredom and submitting to one's own self-contempt. I was sticking down envelopes with a damp brush one afternoon, when a young man who seemed to enjoy being a civil servant commented: 'Soul-destroying, isn't it?' A commonplace phrase, but I had never heard it before, and I repeated it like a revelation. Not soul-destroying, but life-destroying; the stagnating life-force gives off smells like standing water, and the whole being is poisoned. Desmond—that was his name—always looked well groomed and efficient, and I never saw him lose his temper. My own predisposition to boredom and irritable wretchedness inclined me to divide the world into two classes: people who disliked themselves, and people who didn't. And the former disliked the latter even more than they disliked themselves.
    Such experiences were the groundwork of all my analyses, my starting point; and all my thought aimed at discovering some solution that would enable the people who disliked themselves to find reasons—or methods—of overcoming self-contempt, without numbing themselves into complacency. I called the people who disliked