Collin Wilson revisited

Dr. Jassim Taqui

DG Al-Bab Institute for Strategic Studies

Islamabad, October 27,  2021: The whole world lives today an era, which was predicted by the British scholar, Collin Wilson, in his famous book The outsider. The book was published way back in 1956.

Wilson conceived the character of the outsider while he was studying the works and lives of various artists including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of Its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and George Gurdjieff.

Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society's effect on him.

On Christmas Day, 1954, alone in his room, Wilson sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He described his feelings as follows:

It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favorite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger: alone in my room, feeling cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished...Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: 'Notes for a book The Outsider in Literature..."

 

The Outsider has been translated into over thirty languages (including Russian and Chinese) and has never been out of print since its publication day of 28 May 1956. Wilson wrote much of it in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and during this period was, for a time, living in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath.

The outsider is an in-depth analysis of a peculiar personality that does not affiliate with any ideology. Yet, this outsider is creative by shaping the minds of others and leading them to reject the status quo.

From the outsider emerged a multi-polar world. The outsider caused the end of a bipolar world and the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Similarly, The outsider challenges today the US's desperate attempt to create a unipolar system by imposing Anglo-Saxons as hegemon on the rest of the world.