Colin Wilson

This, it seemed to me, is the basic difference between human beings. Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money.

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 was always intended to do.

An immense confusion bewilders me. It is as if I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much.

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality. Even Keats could write, in a letter to Browne just before he died: ‘I feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence.’

Put me in a System and you negate me—I am not just a mathematical symbol—I am.

In his early novel, La Nausée, Sartre skilfully synthesizes all the points we have already considered in connexion with Wells and Barbusse: the unreality, the rejection of people and civilized standards, and, finally, the ‘cinema sheet’ of naked existence, with ‘no way out or round or through’.

Certainly something is happening. There is his ordinary life, with its assumptions of meaning, purpose, usefulness. And there are these revelations, or, rather, these attacks of nausea, that knock the bottom out of his ordinary life. The reason is not far to seek. He is too acute and honest an observer.

L’homme est un passion inutile.

There is no choice, in Roquentin’s reckoning; there is only being useless and knowing it and being useless and not knowing it.