a Chinese edition of The
Outsider
Postscript 2001 to Chapter One
WHEN I began to write The
Outsider nearly half-a-century ago, Sartre was the most famous writer in
Europe, with Albert Camus coming a
close second. I had been preoccupied - since I was 13 - with the question: “Why
are we alive, and what are we supposed to do now we are here?”, and was naturally
fascinated by existentialism which had become the most widely discussed
European philosophy since the end of the war in 1945. But its pessimism was
simply not to my taste. Sartre used to tell enthusiastic audiences: “You are
free! You have the power of choice! Go and use it! And members of the audience
would approach him afterwards and say “Yes, but what should we do with it?” It
would have been pointless, and perhaps cruel, to reply: “If you have to ask me,
you are not free.”
It was not until three years after
the publication of The Outsider (1956) that I began to see an important
part of the answer. I had received a letter from an American professor of psychology named Abraham Maslow, and he
introduced me to his concept of the “peak experience”. These are these odd
flashes of sheer joy and optimism that all healthy people experience again and
again - glimpses of what the writer G. K. Chesterton called “absurd good news”.
Maslow told me that he had got sick of studying sick people because they talked
about nothing but their sickness. So he had the revolutionary idea of studying
healthy people instead. And he soon discovered that what characterised these
healthy people was that they had “peak experiences” with a fair degree of
frequency. The peak experience, of course, is a sudden feeling of freedom.
He also made another important discovery. Most of his students could recall
various peak experiences, and when they began to describe and exchange these
with other students, they began having peak experiences all the time. Why?
Because discussing peak experiences placed them in a cheerful and optimistic
frame of mind, and when we are optimistic, peak experiences come easy. We
suddenly realise that we are free.
The German philosopher Fichte said:
“To be free is nothing. To become free is heavenly.” The peak experience
is the simplest method of ceasing to merely “be” free, and of becoming
free. An example: a young mother was preparing breakfast for her husband and
children when a beam of sunlight came in through the window. The thought “My
God, aren't I lucky?” struck her, and she went into the peak experience. But
she had been “lucky” (i.e. free) before the sunlight came in the window; now
she suddenly became free.
What members of Sartre’s audience
were, in effect, saying was: “You say we are free, but merely to be free
is nothing. How can we become free?” But neither Sartre nor Camus could
have answered that question because they were fundamentally pessimists, and (on
the whole) pessimists do not have peak experiences.
A modern psychologist called George
Pransky has taken Mallow’s insight a step further, although he learned it from
an ordinary non-academic, non-professional working man called Sydney Banks.
Banks had been telling a friend how unhappy he was when the friend remarked:
“You’re not unhappy, Syd, you just think you are.” As it sank in, Banks
looked at him in amazement. “Do you realise what you've just said?” What had
suddenly dazzled him was the insight that that nearly all our psychological
problems arise from our thoughts. What the friend was saying was: people
make themselves unhappy with their thoughts. Pessimists do not have peak
experiences because they are pessimists. Optimists do have peak experiences
because they are optimists.
Banks was so overwhelmed by this
insight that he began presenting it to audiences. Pransky was one of those who
heard him and who was converted from the old pessimistic Freudianism. Pransky
noted one interesting thing: all the people at the seminar struck him as
exceptionally healthy and cheerful. They were “copers”, people who felt in
charge of their lives. This, I can now see, is the fundamental solution
to the problem stated by the existentialists. They all place undue emphasis on
man’s weakness and misery, and then insist that this is “the human condition”.
It isn’t.
Postscript 2001 to Chapter
Two
HERE again we have more
insights confirming and expanding those of the last chapter. After Camus’
Meursault has lost his temper with the priest, he has an explosive peak
experience in which he realises: “I had been happy, and I was happy still.” Yet
the man who describes staying in bed and smoking cigarettes all morning is not
obviously happy. Can we be happy and not realise it? Yes, very easily. In fact,
this is the normal state of human beings. When we are subjected to some crisis,
we pray that it will go away. “And then,” we think, “I shall be able to return
to my usual state of contentment, and life will be marvellous.” Our ordinary,
everyday state of non-crisis seems to us infinitely desirable, where as we
usually regard this as a recipe for boredom.
Hans Keller, former music director
of the BBC, described in a broadcast how, before the Second World War, he was
in Nazi Germany, and saw fellow Jews disappearing into concentration camps. He
described how he prayed: “Oh God, only let me get out of Germany, and I swear
I’ll never be unhappy again.” He did not, of course, live up to his promise -
he was an oversensitive, touchy little man - but then, his experiences as a Jew
had made him deeply pessimistic, and it is almost impossible to retain a
feeling of freedom if you are
pessimistic.
Hemingway’s story Soldier’s Home
provides an even deeper insight into this problem. Krebs, the soldier returning
from the war, is utterly bored in his small home town, as bored as Meursault
seems to be at the beginning of L’Etranger.
Yet he recalls “all the times that had been able to make him feel cool and
clear inside him...the times when he had done the one thing, the only thing for
a man to do, easily and naturally”, and feels that he has lost the ability to
recall them. But what actually happens in a crisis, when you are suddenly
galvanised into doing “the one thing, the only thing for a man to do...”? It is
as if you have been shaken awake, and another part of your psyche takes
over, a part with far greater powers than the “everyday you”.
Let me suggest an analogy. Suppose
that a learner-driver had been hypnotised into believing that a car had to be
driven from the passenger seat and he managed to acquire this uncomfortable
skill with immense effort. But then, one day, on a mountain road, a truck
hurtles around the corner, and instantly, without thinking, he leaps
into the driving seat, and prevents an accident. And from now on, the hypnotic
conditioning vanishes, and he knows that a car must be driven from the driving
seat. When human beings become bored, they lose all sense of reality, and
somehow find themselves in the passenger seat. They lose the sense of being in
control of their lives, and slip into an attitude of passivity. Yet any crisis
can instantly de-hypnotise them and make them realise that being in control,
far from being difficult, is quite normal. When we are “awake”, the “real you”
takes over, and life is transformed.
Hemingway learned this lesson from
the war. Knowing this secret of “waking
up” gave his early work its tremendous vitality and sense of immediacy. But his
response to this recognition - that crisis causes us to wake up - meant that he
spent his life looking for activities that would induce this feeling of crisis
- bullfighting, big game hunting, shark fishing, seeking out wars. But looking
for crises soon becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns; he became an
alcoholic, and finally blew his brains out. Hemingway’s problem was that his
premises were deeply pessimistic; since death, the ultimate reality, negated
all human values, there could be no possible solution. Granville-Barker’s Secret
Life, although it expresses the same disillusionment as Eliot’s The
Waste Land, has a clear intuition of a solution. The secret life is the
wellspring deep inside us that makes us aware of Chesterton’s “absurd good
news”. The only way to tap that spring is to do things with enthusiasm and a
sense of purpose. Even making a good pen nib demands vital purpose. Oliver asks
Lord Clumbermere whether he is a devil who wants to beat the souls of men into
pen nibs, and Clumbermere admits he does not know the answer. Yet the answer is
perfectly simple, and was even expressed by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer.
Tom has been ordered to paint the fence on a Saturday morning. When his friends
come to poke fun at him, Tom whistles and looks as if he is enjoying it. And
soon his friends are queuing up to be allowed to whitewash the fence, and even
paying for the privilege. Work, says Twain, is that which one is obliged to do.
Play is that which one is not obliged to do. Therefore the difference between
work and play is simply an attitude. In fact, we all know this. If we
are forced to perform some boring task,
and obliged to make an effort whether we like it or not, we quickly find
ourselves enjoying it. We have drilled through to the wellsprings of “the secret life”. Oliver’s trouble is that
he is so convinced by his own pessimism that he will not make that effort to
re-charge his vital batteries. Evan Strowde knows that, but Oliver still has to
learn it. And when Susan tells him that he will have to be “reborn”, he says:
“Do you wonder I’m afraid of you, Susan?” But he will have to learn it all the
same.
The “secret life” is, if course, our
deep subconscious impulses. And what Maslow and Sydney Banks and Pransky are
saying is that our laziness inclines us to live too close to the surface to be
aware of these impulses. (This is the problem of Camus’ Meursault - his life is
superficial because nothing galvanises him into making any real effort.) The
result is that, like Sydney Banks, we may think we are unhappy when this
is quite untrue - we are merely misinterpreting the state of the “real you” who
lives on the same level as the “secret life”. But any crisis can jerk us awake.
As Doctor Johnson said: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a
fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Postscript 2001 to Chapter Three
THERE is a sense in which this
chapter should have been the first in the book because romanticism was my
essential starting point. I was fascinated by the romantics of the 19th
century, and by the problem of why so many of them committed suicide, or died
of tuberculosis. I loved Keats and Shelley, Hoffmann, Novalis, Pushkin, and
especially Goethe. Their problem seemed to be that most of them found the
dreariness of everyday life intolerable, and longed for some more intense form
of existence. They found this in the world of imagination. But they soon
discovered - what I had discovered in my teens - that spending too much time in
the world of imagination is debilitating and bad for the health.
Thomas Mann expressed it perfectly
in Buddenbrooks. Young Hanno Buddenbrook is the descendant of many
generations of successful merchants; but he has no desire to enter the world of
commerce - he prefers the world of music and dreams. One evocative section
describes family holidays at the seaside, and how Hanno delights in the world
of distant horizons and water-ribbed sand, of bandstands and hotel ballrooms.
What his family cannot understand is why, when he returns home, his health has
not improved - in fact, it is worse. They cannot understand that the holiday at
the seaside has, so to speak, “sensitised” him, so he cannot bear the cold
winds of reality. (It was only after Mann's death that the world learned that
he was homosexual and deeply ashamed of it, and that this played a central part
in his curious death-romanticism.)
When I wrote The Outsider,
the work of Hermann Hesse was scarcely known in the English-speaking world,
even though he had received the Nobel Prize in 1946. I had discovered the Nobel
Prize-winning novel The Glass Bead Game on a library shelf in Archway. A
German friend named Alfred Reynolds had
told me about Demian, Narziss and Goldmund and Steppenwolf,
and I had read these in the reading room of the British Museum, so when I
planned The Outsider, that Christmas of 1954, Hesse was an obvious
choice for inclusion. (It was after The Outsider that American academics
began to write theses on Hesse but, oddly enough, not one of them mentioned my
name - the great “backswing” had occurred and I was unmentionable.)
Hesse seemed to me so important
because he had defined the basic “Outsider problem” so precisely in Steppenwolf,
in the passage where, at the end of a long and unsatisfying day, the hero
drinks a glass of wine, and suddenly “the golden bubble burst...and I was
reminded of Mozart and the stars” - Maslow’s “peak experience”. That is the essence of the problem -
how to re-create the peak experience at will. This problem Hesse never
succeeded in solving. Yet in a novel called Journey to the East (Morgenlandfahrt),
which had not been translated into English when I wrote The Outsider, he
has this extraordinarily important sentence: “I, whose calling was really only
that of a violinist and storyteller, was responsible for the provision of music
for our group, and I then discovered how a long time devoted to small details
exalts us and increases our strength.” It is interesting that, although Hesse
never succeeded in solving the “Outsider problem”, he should here have stumbled
on the answer almost by accident. “Time devoted to small details” relaxes us
and causes us to become aware of the gentle trickling sound of the wellsprings
of the secret life.
Postscript 2001 to Chapter Four
TWO publishers who read The
Outsider considered this the central chapter of the book, and I am inclined
to agree with them. I had often seen Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom
on library shelves, but it looked intimidatingly large. Then I came upon a
volume of extracts from Lawrence’s work, The Essential T. E. Lawrence,
and became fascinated by the Seven Pillars and by Lawrence’s
personality. My first wife had Seven Pillars in two volumes, and I now
devoured the book, recognising that Lawrence was one of the great “Outsider”
figures I had been writing about for years. When a new one-volume edition was
published, I bound my copy in soft leather so I could carry it in my rucksack
with a few other favourite authors like Plato and William Blake. I got to know
it so well that I could quote long passages from it (most of them were included
in The Outsider).
As in the case of Thomas Mann, many
interesting facts about Lawrence began to emerge long after his death. In the
case of Lawrence, the Public Record Office began releasing new documents in
1968, and two investigating journalists, Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson,
began to study them. The “Deraa incident” was obviously central in Lawrence's
life, and he had told Bernard Shaw’s wife Charlotte that what he had failed to
reveal in Seven Pillars was that he had permitted the Bey to sodomise
him, and that this had caused a loss of self-respect that had haunted him ever
since. That sounded plausible enough. But what was revealed by the new papers
was rather more startling: that Lawrence’s basic sexual problem was that he was
a masochist who enjoyed being beaten. He had hired a Scot named John Bruce as
his valet, and Bruce subsequently joined the Army with him. Lawrence told Bruce
an absurd story about a relative called “the Old Man” who felt that Lawrence
had disgraced the family name, and ordered that he should be beaten. On this
pretext, he persuaded Bruce to administer floggings on his bare buttocks. Since
Knightly and Simpson had established that the Bey who was have supposed to have
sodomised Lawrence, Hacim Muhittim, was robustly heterosexual, it seems
possible that the truth of the Deraa incident was not as Lawrence told it. This, of course, makes no difference to my
line of argument in The Outsider, and certainly does not in any way
alter my opinion of Lawrence as one of the most remarkable “Outsider” figures
of the twentieth century.
My opinion of Van Gogh is also
unchanged; it still seems to be that the whole “Outsider problem” is epitomised
in the contrast between Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night and the
words of his suicide note: “Misery will never end”. Whenever I am in New York,
I make a point of visiting the Museum of Modern Art to look at The Starry
Night, and I have had a reproduction of it facing my bed for many years.
As to Nijinsky’s Diary, it
might almost be regarded as the starting point of The Outsider. When I
was 17, a friend named Alan Bates handed me a copy of the Diary with the
comment: “Here, I think this is more your cup of tea than mine.” And indeed it
was. I became obsessed by Nijinsky and ballet, and even took some steps to find
out whether I might become a ballet dancer. At 17, it seemed I was too old to
start. But when I first came to live in London, at the age of 20, with my first
wife, I wrote a long essay on Nijinsky that contained all the main concepts of The
Outsider and sent it to his wife Romola. She never replied. But four
years later, when The Outsider was a best seller, she wrote me a
complimentary letter. I was still embittered about her silence - a reply from
her would have made so much difference to me at 21 - and did not answer. The
new translation of the diary, published in 1995, reveals that Romola was having
an affair with Nijinsky’s doctor, Hans Frenkel, at the time Nijinsky was going
insane, and speculates whether Nijinsky may have guessed what was going on and
that this contributed to his insanity - only to dismiss this as unlikely. But
Nijinsky was a remarkably sensitive man, and I would not be surprised if he did
not know instinctively that his wife was being unfaithful.
After The Outsider had been
accepted by the publisher Victor Gollancz, but no contract had yet been signed,
I allowed the novelist Angus Wilson to persuade me to show it to his own publisher,
Fred Warburg (of Secker and Warburg). Warburg immediately offered to publish
it, but wanted me to expand this fourth chapter to twice its present length. I
knew this would be a mistake - I had already said all I wanted to say in it -
and decided to sign the contract with Gollancz. The immense success of the book
made me aware of some of the forces that had driven Nijinsky insane. Like
Nijinsky, I was essentially an introvert, totally absorbed in my own world of
outsiderism and romanticism. The overnight “fame” was like being thrown into a
bath of cold water. On the morning of publication, after the first reviews had
appeared, Warburg’s wife came to my home to ask me to agree to let him publish
my next book. For reasons I have now forgotten, Gollancz found out and went
into a fit of moral indignation. As to me, I felt I was being dragged into a
world of businessmen and publicists and tabloid journalists that left me
feeling confused and rebellious - it was almost a relief when my second book, Religion
and the Rebel, was attacked as violently as The Outsider had been
praised, and life suddenly became sane and normal once more.
All this explains why I sympathised
so deeply with Nijinsky - so much so that some ballet-lovers accused me of
reading something into him that was not really there. But what I recognised in Nijinsky
was a genius that sprang out of what Kierkegaard meant when he said “truth is
subjectivity”- a natural contact with our inner “source of power, meaning and
purpose”. This is what made Nijinsky a great dancer. No one who watched him
dance could doubt that greatness; yet among people, he was so silent that his
colleagues called him “dumb-bell” behind his back. That inner-power could find
its way into the outer world only through dancing, and when dancing was taken
away from him, it was like having his legs amputated.
THE Outsider was
originally entitled The Pain Threshold, but my publisher persuaded me to
change it. (I had decided against calling it The Outsider because Camus’
L’Etranger was translated in England under that title.) His decision
was, of course, correct.
The descriptions of the “vastations”
of William James and Henry James Snr meant a great deal to me because I had
also been through the vastation experience. In my mid-teens I had gone indoors
on a hot summer day to make myself tea, but standing up suddenly induced a
“blackout”. I stood there, keeping myself upright by holding on to the stove,
aware that my usual sense of control over my body was an illusion. The “I” had
vanished and there was only a consciousness that was a consciousness of
nothing. For days after that I was haunted by an appalling sense of
meaninglessness; it seemed that everything I had believed in and taken for
granted was an illusion.
When I later came upon Jouffroy’s experience
of his total loss of belief, I recognised it as what had happened to me. I
labelled it “nihilism”, the experience of nothingness. The young Nietzsche had
been through the same experience, which had led to a profound intellectual
scepticism (and it was this that would make him so popular with French
“post-modern” philosophers like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze). But instead of
remaining trapped in pessimism, like Schopenhauer, he emerged from it with a
triumphant optimism. This is what attracted me so much. Oddly enough, every
other great philosopher in world history has been a
pessimist. Even Plato makes Socrates say that death is a consummation, since
the philosopher spends his life trying to separate his body and his spirit. And
Plato’s pupil Aristotle says: “It is better not to have been born, and death is
better than life.” By contrast, Nietzsche was the first genuinely optimistic
philosopher. The irony, of course, is that he died insane. Yet I have never
doubted that the answer lies in optimism - the supreme surge of affirmation
that Nietzsche experienced on the Strasbourg road as his old cavalry unit rode
past, or on the hill called Leutch as the storm broke: “Will, pure will,
without the troubles and perplexities of intellect - how happy, how free!” This
is clearly Maslow’s “peak experience”. And Maslow had noted that there are many
people who are natural “peakers”; George Pransky observed them at Sydney
Banks’s seminar where the people present seemed to exude a sense of optimism,
of being in control of their lives. The reason Nietzsche became insane was not
because he was unable to sustain the optimism of Zarathustra, but because he
caught syphilis from a prostitute.
ONCE again, we are back to the
pessimism of The Pain Threshold,
the sudden revelation of the meaninglessness of human existence. This is the
revelation that comes to Tolstoy’s “madman” in the middle of the night. But
Tolstoy’s answer to the problem was religion: his landowner walks back from church
talking to peasants about the Bible.
At the time I wrote The Outsider
I was far more inclined to accept the religious solution than I am today. I was
fascinated by the great mystics: Boehme, Suso, Eckhart, St John of the Cross,
and therefore was willing to consider that the “answer” might lie within a
religious framework. Now this seems to be to be a mistake: the answer was
closer and simpler than I thought. We see this answer clearly whenever we are
faced with any kind of crisis. For example, it is expressed with great power in
a passage in the autobiography of the mathematician J. W. N.Sullivan, But
for the Grace of God. Sullivan describes how, during the First World War,
he found himself in a Serbian hospital: “Looking out on those dark, alien Serbian
hills after a day spent amongst the
sights and odours of suppurating flesh (for all our wounded, on the long
journey from the front, developed gangrene) I had visions of Paradise. I have
pictured (London’s) lighted Strand, one of the golden street of Heaven, and
hungered for its ambrosia, two poached eggs on toast, in those dazzling halls
of light called Lyons’ restaurants. It was inconceivable to me that I could
ever have been discontented with life
in such celestial surroundings. The thought of a London bus on a rainy evening,
its windows steamy with the breath of its crowded passengers, splashing
its way through the dark space around Trafalgar Square, filled me with a
yearning that perhaps an exiled cherub would experience for its chariot of fire.
I felt that I had learned my lesson. If ever I were permitted to live again my
ordinary life I would never, I reflected, commit the blasphemy of thinking it
dull... Perhaps I would enjoy riches. I might like to possess a Rolls-Royce, a
country villa in the South of France. But I can still feel, at times, that the
transition from an overcrowded Serbian hospital, even to a life of one room, a
bed, a chair and a penny newspaper every morning, is so vast that the
millionaire’s extra advantages are hardly perceptible on that scale.” Sullivan
has seen the answer - that our problem lies in a tendency to take everyday
reality for granted, and fail to make the imaginative effort to grasp how lucky
we are. As Syd Banks’s friend said, we are not really unhappy - we just think
we are. Auden expressed the same insight in his poem The Maze:
The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious mind.
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.
What makes Dostoevsky so extraordinary is that he was able to rise above his suffering to recognise that (as Kirilov says): “Everything’s good”- what G. K. Chesterton meant by “absurd good news”. This is something that Dostoevsky had grasped when he was reprieved at the last minute from the firing squad, and it remained with him all his life as a counterbalance to his neurotic self-hatred.
THIS chapter is perhaps the
central one of The Outsider because it sprang out of an insight that led
me to write the book. One evening in the autumn of 1954 I was walking along the
Thames Embankment with my friend Bill Hopkins, speaking to him of my novel Ritual
in the Dark on which I had been working since my teens. I explained that
its three chief characters represented different aspects of man. The hero,
Sorme, is an intellectual, like Nietzsche or Lawrence; the painter, Oliver
Glasp, is fundamentally emotional, like Van Gogh; while the homosexual killer,
Austin Nunne, is basically physically-oriented, like Nijinsky. Sorme has
concentrated on his intellectual development, to the neglect of his emotions
and body; Glasp has concentrated on his emotional development, to the neglect
of intellect and body; Nunne has focused on the body, neglecting the intellect
and emotions. It struck me that the three of them might be regarded all
together as a single “complete man” who would possess control of intellect,
body and emotions. As it was, each lacked something the others possessed.
As I began to plan The Outsider,
I saw that Dostoevsky had arrived at the same instinctive recognition in The
Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan represents the intellect, Alyosha the
emotions and Mitya the body. All three brothers are in some sense incomplete,
and need the other two to counterbalance their qualities. So it could be said
that The Outsider was started as a commentary on the ideas of Ritual
in the Dark. It also seemed to me that Ivan’s arguments in the
Pro and Contra chapter go to the very heart of the most fundamental
problem of human existence. Does not the violence and brutality of our world
negate the idea that life has some kind of underlying meaning? Hemingway had
argued in his Natural History of the Dead that all our moral and
religious ideas are absurd in the face of death - absurd in Camus’ sense.
Dostoevsky was arguing that our natural craving to believe in the love of God
(or the benevolence of the universe) is based on illusion. Alyosha also
glimpses the same negative insight when the decay of Father Zossima’s corpse
undermines his belief in miracles, but it is banished by his vision of the
night sky, after his dream of Cana.
It is hard for human beings to grasp
that their worst fears, the things they find themselves brooding about at two
o’clock in the morning, are simply spectres evoked by their own negative
thoughts. The negative powers of the human mind are appalling; but it is
important to recognise that these ghosts are of our own creation.
For me, the essence of Dostoevsky’s
greatness lies in that recognition of Raskolnikov, when he contemplates the
idea of being executed for his crime, and says: “If I had to stand on a narrow ledge
forever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would still rather do that than die
at once.” We all know precisely what he means: that if someone placed a gun
barrel against our heads and said: “Well, which is it to be: narrow ledge or
die at once?”, we would all cry out “Narrow ledge!” For we recognise that
immediate death would rob us of the
“eternal spirit of the chainless mind”, this “intellectual being” that can
wander through eternity. Yet it is equally obvious that we are not yet
capable of this degree of freedom. We are, as H. G. Wells once pointed out,
like the first dinosaurs who dragged themselves out of prehistoric seas on to the land.
Footnote: The evolution of
the human mind means that a new kind of man is coming into being, a man for
whom mere physical existence, with its endless coarseness and triviality, is
deeply unsatisfactory. Yet he can only spend a short time in the world of the
mind, then he becomes tired, and has to return to ordinary physical existence.
These “mental travellers” have not yet learned to stand upright. Yet their
destiny is quite clearly to walk on two legs in the world of mental reality.
I HAD discovered the Journals
of George Fox in the local library when I was in my late teens, and had
immediately recognised him as an “Outsider”, suffering from a deep
dissatisfaction that he found difficult to understand. It was, of course, the
frustration of a man who can find no outlet for his vital energies, so that he
experiences something like the discomfort of a distended bladder. Fox’s
response was to behave rather like a madman, and to walk through Lichfield
shouting “Woe the to bloody city of Lichfield”. Fox was suffering from the same
kind of inner torment that drove Nijinsky to walk around St Moritz with a gold
cross over his shirt, stopping passers-by and telling them to go to church. Fox
relieved this painful inner pressure by becoming a preacher and founding the
Quaker movement. The problem with such a solution is that it is hard to maintain a balance between
“religious enthusiasm” and common sense, as Fox’s disciple James Nayler
demonstrated when he allowed himself to be persuaded that he was the Messiah
and rode into Bristol on a donkey. Fox always resisted the temptation to regard
himself as some kind of Messiah; yet I personally could never feel that founding
a religious movement was the logical solution to the problems expressed in the
early pages of his Journals. I would later explain my misgivings more
fully in a book called The Devil’s Party (2001), devoted to this problem
of self-appointed messiahs, and how they almost invariably overbalance into
pure self-delusion.
William Blake was never tempted to
start his own religious movement; he was aware that the only valid solution lay
inside himself. Blake was a natural “peaker” who was closer to the ideas of
Maslow than anyone else in this book. His peculiar genius lies in the the fact
that he recognised that the misery of
the human race is caused by being trapped in a narrow room whose windows are
the five senses, a stuffy, cobwebby closet that Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov mistook
for eternity. “For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ the
chinks of his cavern.” But, Blake insisted, man is not trapped in his
cavern; he can “pass out what time he will”. How? By recognising that it is he
who has locked himself up, and understanding how this has come about. And that
requires us to understand that we are not really unhappy; we just think
we’re unhappy. We are trapped by what Blake called “the spectre”. Yet every
peak experience makes us aware that - as Meursault realised - “I had been
happy, and I was happy still”. In short, we see the world from a “worm’s-eye
view”, and close-upness deprives us of meaning. But when Maslow’s students
began talking about their peak experiences, they began having peak experiences
all the time; they realised that we have a natural faculty that enables us to
see reality from a bird’s-eye view. One quotation in this chapter cries out for
a footnote: the paragraph from Whitehead stating that “Chinese science is
practically negligible”. That was written before Joseph Needham had written his
vast Science and Civilisation in China. Yet Whitehead’s point is by no
means invalid. Chinese science did not lead to the development of the internal
combustion engine and a technological civilisation; and this is because, as
Whitehead pointed out, the oriental temperament is contemplative rather than
materialistic.
IN this final chapter I
attempted to state clearly what I feel to be the solution to these problems of
“Outsiderism”. I begin by going back to Axel, with his “Live? Our servants can
do that for us”, and decline to condemn him, even if he has obviously chosen
the wrong solution. The right solution, I feel, lies in the mystic Traherne,
who saw the corn as “orient and immortal wheat”. Of deep interest is his remark
that “it is not our parents’ loins so much as our parents’ lives that enthralls
and blinds us”. In other words, it is habit - as William James says, “a habit
of inferiority to our true selves”.
I have always been - and still am -
fascinated by mystical experience, such as the following: “One evening I set
out by myself as usual to walk up a lane towards the woods. I was not feeling
particularly happy or particularly sad, just ordinary. I was certainly not
‘looking’ for anything, just going for
a walk to be peaceful. It must have been August, because the corn was ripe and
I only had a summer dress and sandals on. I was almost to the wood when I
paused, turned to look at the cornfield, took two or three steps forward so I
was able to touch the ears of corn and watched them swaying in the faint
breeze. I looked to the end of the field - it had a hedge then - and beyond
that to some tall trees towards the village. The sun was over to my left; it
was not in my eyes. Then - there must be a blank. I will never know for how
long, because I was only in my normal conscious mind with normal faculties as I
came out of it.
“Everywhere surrounding me was this
white, brilliant, sparkling light, like sun on frosty snow, like a million
diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees,no sky, this light was
everywhere; my ordinary eyes were open, but I was not seeing with them. It can
only have lasted a moment I think or I would have fallen over. This feeling was
indescribable, but I have never experienced anything in the years that followed
that can compare with that glorious moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt
open-mouthed wonder. Then the tops of the trees became visible once again, then
a piece of sky, and gradually the light was no more, and the cornfield
was spread before me. I stood there for a long time, trying in vain for it to
come back and I have tried many times since, but I only saw it once; but I know
in my heart it is still there - and here - and everywhere around us. I know heaven
is within us and around us. I have had this wonderful experience which brought
happiness beyond compare.” (From Seeing the Invisible, Modern Religious and
Other Transcendent Experiences, edited by Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin).
This experience of a 16-year-old girl
is one of many submitted to the the Alister Hardy Research Centre in Oxford.
What happened to her is clearly what Blake meant when he said: “If the doors of
perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
She states that she is certain that this “light” is still around her - and
everyone but cannot be seen, except in these sudden strange glimpses.
Ramakrishna, whom I go on to
discuss, found his own way of recovering the vision. As a child he had glimpsed
it when he saw a flock of white cranes against a black thundercloud. Later, in sheer
despair at being unable to recover the vision, he seized a sword, and was on
the point of killing himself when “the blessed mother revealed herself to me”,
and he found himself surrounded by a “limitless, shining ocean of consciousness
or spirit” - clearly the same “light” that the girl speaks of. From then on,
even the name of the divine mother could plunge Ramakrishna into this state of
ecstasy.
In later books, I have often pointed
out the similarity between this experience and the experience of Russian
roulette described by the novelist Graham Greene. Greene expressed his
overwhelming sense of relief when the hammer clicked on an empty chamber in the
words: “It was as if a light had been turned on.” Again and again, the “glimpse
of reality” is expressed in terms of light. But comparing Greene’s experience
with Ramakrishna’s vision of the divine mother raises an interesting question.
Greene played Russian roulette half-a-dozen times, but each time the intensity
diminished. And he went on to become one of the most pessimistic of modern
novelists. Yet for Ramakrishna, the experience was life-changing, and he could
always make the “light” return. Why? The answer lies again in that simple
recognition of the central importance of thought. Maslow’s students went on
having peak experiences because they recognised that it was merely a matter of
switching on a light, and that they now knew where to find the switch. Greene
continued to think negatively - as all his work reveals - and so had no idea of
how to find his way to the light switch. Ramakrishna would have said that
Greene continued to think of himself as a sheep, and refused to believe that he
was a tiger.
When I began The Outsider, I
was aware that Gurdjieff would occupy a central place in its last chapter
because Gurdjieff had recognised that the basic problem of human consciousness is
a kind of sleep, a tendency to automatism. This is why the 16-year-old girl
could not recover her vision of light; a kind of automaton inside her kept
dragging her consciousness along its usual routes in the way that railway lines
keep a train moving in a certain direction, and when that happened she would
fall into a state akin to hypnosis. In her moment of vision, she had ceased to
be automatic.
The first major philosopher to
recognise that our minds impose habit structures on our perceptions was
Immanuel Kant. He called the “railway lines” “categories”, and believed that
even space and time are “categories” - that is, that our minds impose them on
reality in order to grasp it. Imagine a race of superbeings on another
planet whose language is so subtle and
complex that no human being could ever hope to grasp it. So when they encounter
a group of human space travellers, they quickly realise that it is no use
trying to teach them their language (let us call it Zarkan); humans are simply
not clever enough. The superbeings are forced to address them in a kind of
pidgin-Zarkan from which all subtle distinctions have been erased. Kant’s view
is that the universe around us is as complex and subtle as the Zarkan language,
so we have no hope of understanding it. Before they can even begin to grasp it,
our minds are forced reduce it to pidgin-Zarkan. What can we do about this?
According to Gurdjieff, we are asleep, so our minds are not even aware that
what they call “reality” is a crude kind of pidgin-Zarkan. Our only chance of
doing anything about this is to (a) realise we are asleep, (b) make a determined
effort to awaken. Then we might stand some chance of seeing the world as Thomas
Traherne or the 16-year-old girl saw it.
The American novelist Howard Fast
made an interesting attempt to deal with the problem in a story called The
First Man. A little Indian girl is taken by a female wolf when she is a
baby, and brought up as a wolf. (There have been many such cases; the children
are known as “feral children”.) When the child is found, she is virtually an
idiot; it is impossible to communicate with her. The habit of being a
wolf is so strong that it can never be broken; her intelligence is permanently
reduced. The scientist-hero of the story makes the suggestion that among human
beings, a few are born with superhuman possibilities. But these possibilities
soon evaporate as the child grows up among mere humans, and its intelligence is
permanently reduced to the level of the rest of us. But suppose, he suggests,
we could devise intelligence tests for newly-born babies which would make us
aware of the potential super-humans (or man-plus, as Fast calls them.) And
suppose these babies were carefully educated by highly-trained teachers,
and allowed to mix with other
super-children: would this not be a possible method for breeding a higher type
of human being? In Fast’s story, the experiment is successful; they breed
super-children who are telepathic, and who possess strange powers. At that
point, the American government - which has subsidised the experiment - becomes
so alarmed that it decides that these new humans must be destroyed; but it is
too late, and as the story ends, we gather that the human race is about to
become super-humanised whether it likes it or not.
When I first read this story of
Fast’s, in 1961, I was excited because it seemed to me that he and I were
approaching the same subject from different angles. I contacted Fast to ask him
whether he believed that an experiment like the one he described was a real
possibility. He replied that indeed he did. He had implied as much in the
story: “They (men-plus) are not of recent arrival; they have been cropping up
for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.” If such beings evolved by chance,
they would feel oddly ill-at-ease in the world, without fully understanding why. They might even begin to
feel that their kind of intelligence and insight were a disadvantage to their
survival - perhaps even that it was a kind of illness.(Wagner once went to take
the waters in a German spa town, hoping to be “cured” of his love of music
which he felt was destroying his happiness.) In short, they would feel
themselves to be “Outsiders”. In which case, there ought to be some way of
helping them to realise that they are not merely “Outsiders” - that they are
potential members of a community of “man-plus”.
The problem, as Gurdjieff said, is
our “automatism”. In my sequel to The Outsider, Religion and the
Rebel, I called it the “automatic pilot”. Yet I have always suspected that
Gurdjieff is inclined to exaggerate the difficulty of ceasing to be
“mechanical”. And in 1967, when writing an essay for a symposium called Challenges
of Humanistic Psychology, I expressed my own view of the problem when I
said that we all possess a kind of robot-servant who does all kinds of things
for us. I learn to type painfully and slowly, then the “robot” takes over and
does it far better than “I” could. It is the same with learning to drive a car
or speaking a foreign language: “I” learn step by step, then the robot takes it
out of my hands and does it far more efficiently. Our problem is that the robot
not only does the things I want him to do, like driving my car and typing these
words. He also does things I would prefer to do myself. I listen to a symphony
or read a poem that moves me deeply; but the tenth time I do it, the robot has
taken over, and robs the experience of its freshness.
Now, in fact, human beings are, as
Gurdjieff says, largely mechanical. You might say that you consist of about 50
per cent robot, and 50 per cent “real you”. When you grow tired, the robotic
part increases, so you are 51 per cent robot and only 49 per cent “real you”.
On the other hand, when you are feeling fresh and cheerful, you are 49 per cent
robot, and 51 per cent real you. Some people are like this most of the time,
and Maslow calls these “peakers”. Now when Sartre talks about “nausea” (Chapter
One), or Camus about “the absurd” (Chapter Two), they are describing a
condition of low vitality in which they are probably 53 per cent robot, and
only 47 per cent “real you”. The problem with this condition is that it tends
to be self-perpetuating. As George Pransky recognised, once a person is sunk in
gloom, he tends to go on seeing the world in dark colours because his thought
gets stuck, like a gramophone needle in a groove. On the other hand, when Maslow’s
students began to think and talk about peak experiences (which I would define
as a state in which you are about 53 per cent “real you”) they began having
them all the time because, fortunately, optimism also tends to be
self-perpetuating. In that case, the solution would seem to be fairly simple.
The mere comment “You’re not really unhappy Syd, you just think you are”
was enough to alter Banks’s whole mind-set. And the psychology based on Banks’s
insight has had the same effect on hundreds of other people.
Since the early 19th century, our
culture has been dominated by a tendency to pessimism, and this continued
throughout the 20th century - although I think Maslow’s efforts, and even my
own, have had some slight effect. In Freudian psychology, the problem lay in
the notion that we are helpless victims of the unconscious mind. Maslow
objected that he thought Freud had “sold human nature short”. Another
remarkable psychologist, Howard Miller, argued that man is directed by a
“controlling-ego” which he called “the unit of pure thought” and that it is
this mental essence, not the Freudian id, that controls and shapes our lives.
Clearly, these new psychologies are
capable of changing individual lives, and if they eventually ousted the old
Freudian model completely, could also change our civilisation. Potentially,
every person in the world could be educated to become a “peaker”. The whole
face of our society could be changed beyond recognition. And this could be
effected - as it was in Syd Banks - by a simple change in the pattern of our
thought, and by simply getting rid of the pessimism that has dominated our
culture for almost two centuries. This is the reason that my outlook is now
more pragmatically optimistic than it was at the time I wrote The Outsider.
I can suddenly see that it would not be so difficult after all.
Reproduced with the permission of the author. All rights reserved. Special thanks are due to Geoff Ward for bringing this to my attention!