‘The concept that now grips Rilke is in the idea of super-consciousness, and the actual using of his experience in a complete rebuilding of his being.’

‘When closely analysed, it becomes evident that Rilke’s final philosophy is a philosophy of the Will. All experiences can be used as the building bricks of a visionary consciousness if there is a conscious effort at assimilation.’

‘Not being supermen, our brains are not big enough to contain all the world at once: we have to select what is to be remembered; and we remember only those experiences that we allow to penetrate our indifference. Rilke’s Elegies are a plea for an effort of will to assimilate more; a plea for less indifference.’

‘The problem that is still left open is simply the question of how a poet like Rilke is to use the ‘wisdom’ of the poetry to direct his own life. It is the moral question that becomes an existentialist question only by the depth of the attempt to answer it: What shall we do with our lives? The Outsider’s standards are unusually high. For him, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ have a completely new meaning. Ordinary ‘success’ seems particularly poisonous to him: the success of a film star or businessman or the author of a best seller. That is only a way of wading out into the world’s stupidity and losing the possibility of vision.’

‘But has there ever been a social discipline that fitted Outsiders perfectly? Yes. Historical fact leaves no doubt that the Church of the Middle Ages provided such a discipline. It fitted everyone in society, from the highest intellectual types to the meanest artisan. And this has been true of every ‘church’ in history — Hindu, Buddhist, Zarathustrian, Taoist, Mahometan. When these churches were at the height of their health and strength, there were no ‘Outsiders.’ The men of genius were born into a thriving tradition; all of them — thinkers, painters, musicians, storytellers — created for the glory of the Church.’

‘Undoubtedly, the Christian Church made for higher civilisation and culture. First, and most important, it provided men with a sense of spiritual purpose and direction. It emphasised the reality of the spirit. Its authority was entirely for the good, for it gave even the stupidest men a sense of being a part of a great universal scheme.’

‘Moreover, it provided a refuge for Outsiders. The Outsider, I have said, is the prophet in embryo. When a man felt a stirring of those same urges that inspired Jesus — the need to seek for ‘more abundant life’ — he entered the Church, and was able to turn his spiritual energy to good purpose. The Outsider is the anti-world man and the Church which had always declared: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ was the perfect home for him.’

‘But naturally, things began to go wrong. As the Church grew stronger, it also grew more arrogant (Toynbee’s ‘hybris’), more authoritarian. The Outsiders began to find it more and more intolerable. The Outsider naturally begins as an anarchist; it is not until he has begun to understand his spiritual urges that he ceases to be destructive, and concentrates on creation. As the Church became more and more certain of its own power, it ceased to be so tolerant of that early anarchist phase in the Outsiders. In the eleventh century, a sect called the Paterines had objected to simony and other abuses, and the Pope had been glad enough to make use of them in his battle to prevent priests from marrying. A mere century later, Peter Waldo was excommunicated when he objected to the abuses of the Church. The Church was no longer willing to absorb Outsiders who would not knuckle under to its authority from the outset.’

‘This, then, is the situation with which we are faced today: on the one hand, the Church, still using the Vicarious Atonement as its cornerstone; on the other, the scientists and rational philosophers, very many of them men without imagination or inspiration. Between them stand the men who are painfully aware of not belonging to either great tradition: the Outsiders.’

‘The aim of the Church has always been to persuade men to behave as if they were something greater than a bundle of appetites and perceptions. In the twentieth century, science has told man that he is just that and no more.’

‘Open religion is the inspired religious insight of the prophet and saint; closed religion is the ritual and law of a Church. On any level, this opposition between the living force and the forms which it puts on like garments, implies existentialism.’

‘It is the sheer vital energy, the love of life in all its manifestations, which makes Shaw and Wells so attractive. They had about them what Chesterton called ‘a wild gaiety.’ And in Shaw, this gaiety is closely connected with the influence of Mozart.’

‘His very strength makes him unpopular and remote; he showed penetrating insight into this in Back to Methuselah, where he quotes Wells’s parable The Food of the Gods, in which a chemical food makes some people grow to tremendous size, and the rest of the human race develops a passionate hatred of the giants and tries to destroy them. If Shaw had revealed more of his own weakness, as Joyce and Gide did, he might have had more defenders today.’

‘A theme which runs through all Shaw’s work is this theme of the will to power, the refusal to be browbeaten, moral courage.’

‘Shaw’s Caesar is an Outsider for the very reasons which made Shaw declare that Hamlet was an Outsider; because he has evolved a stage beyond his fellow men, and is quite alone among them, alone and incomprehensible.’

‘Don Juan launches a tirade against Insiders which is more devastating than anything in Swift:

In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pew renters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only ‘frail.’ They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.’

‘Shaw implies, like Toynbee, that the Outsider must create the power to revitalise his civilisation.’

‘Shaw’s diagnosis can be summarised: Human beings are fools because they have no time to be wise. They are thrown down into the world, not knowing who they are or what they are supposed to do. Some of them instinctively feel that life should have a purpose and meaning, and manage to imbue their own lives with a certain direction. These we call men of genius. But the majority take the world much as they find it, and are contented if they can keep alive and well fed, and live and die as their parents lived and died. These are the Insiders.’

‘In Man and Superman: that the artist’s task is to create more consciousness. ‘You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.’

‘And now we arrive at a crucial question: Is the Outsider strong enough to create his own tradition, his own way of thought, and to make a whole civilisation think the same way?’

‘The argument I am propounding is quite simple:

Outsiders are a symptom of a dying culture. Without sense of purpose, there can be no life.

Society always begins to die from the head downward. First, the men of genius lose their sense of purpose. When that happens, the decline has begun.’

‘The Outsider is a romantic and a mystic; and what is more, the essence of Western civilisation — the ‘Faustian culture is mystical and romantic. Western culture is the culture of Outsiders. ‘Siegfried, Parsifal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures.’

‘The Outsider is not a ‘crazy mixed-up kid.’ He is not a bored and inefficient bank clerk. The essence of the Outsider problems lies in the need for self-transcendence.’

‘The Outsider’s way of thinking is called existentialism. But it might as easily be called religion. It is a way of thought which, like the religious way, regards man as involved in the universe, not just a spectator and observer, a sort of naturalist looking at the universe through a magnifying-glass and murmuring: “Mmm. Most interesting.’

‘The Outsider is a man who struggles for power over his own complexity, over the civilisation which conditions him and tries to distort his identity. Hesse believed that the Outsider is the highest form of life that civilisation knows — next to the prophet. Nietzsche believed that the Outsider is a halfway house to the Superman. In Toynbee, the Outsiders are the men who solve the problems of a civilisation, and keep it alive.’

‘The Outsider’s greatest need is to find a way in which he can become a visionary. The Outsider is a freethinker because the only kind of thought worth anything is free thought. This means that he can accept nothing until he has proved it by his own direct insight.’

‘For the Insider, moral and intellectual ideas are unimportant in comparison with aesthetic satisfaction. But for the Outsider, nothing matters but moral heroism. The Insider does not mind people being trivial and unheroic because life is still good. The Outsider cannot begin living until he has solved the question of how to live; like Ivan Karamazov, he rejects the world, he rejects life if it must be lived trivially. He craves greater intensity of life.’

‘The Outsider is the heroic figure of our time, and Outsider tragedies — those of Nietzsche, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky — are the great tragedies of our time. That is why the great bulk of modern literature must be detestable to the Outsider.’

‘The Outsider’s question: How does one become a visionary? is the belief that these moments are not beyond reconstruction and comprehension. What is the essence of the ‘moment of vision’? It would seem to be a sense of the multitudinousness of life, a release of energy into the brain (Nijinsky: ‘God is fire in the head’; Yeats: ‘Heaven blazing into the brain’) which revitalises all the areas of one’s memory.’

‘The essence of boredom and exhaustion is the narrowing of the brain, confinement, a sense of being imprisoned in time. This is its opposite: a sense of the immense strangeness and greatness of life, of ‘unknown modes of being.’ It is a tonic emotion that revitalises and creates courage. In which case the man intent on ‘becoming a visionary’ now has a definite aim: to learn enough about the structure of his own brain to be capable of flooding it with energy at will.’

‘The Outsider cannot help feeling that men do not learn from experience — not the really important things. When adulthood is reached, most men seem to reach a level of maturity at which they remain until their faculties begin to decay. There are, of course, some men who seem to squeeze the subtle essence from their experience and learn by it: the great poets and artists. The last quartets of Beethoven represent the accumulated experience of fifty years, and there seems to be no reason why he should not have gone on indefinitely — writing still greater music as he got older.’

‘Very few men can serve as examples of this kind of development. It requires a peculiar sort of honesty. Among modem writers, W. B. Yeats, Andre Gide, Rainer Maria Rilke, possessed this honesty; Rilke especially deserves closer attention as the epitome of the existentialist poet.’

‘But for the Outsider, all men lose their lives in living them. All men are failures.’

‘The Outsider only exists because our civilisation has lost its religion. The Outsider is the result of Whitehead’s ‘bifurcation of nature,’ and Spengler’s Decline is a study of civilisation in which the Outsider has become the representative figure. The bifurcation of nature is the cause of the decline of the West.’

‘The Outsider sees this as the final difference between men. Will power and obsession are all that counts. The obsessed man is great; the satisfied man is not. The Outsider’s natural attitude to philosophy is this: Do not ask whether the philosophy is true; look at the philosopher and ask whether he is great. A man who is not obsessed cannot be great.’

‘The Outsider is the man who yearns for a return to ancient standards — the standards which recognise that ‘cleverness’ is of the intellect alone, that wisdom is a complex of intellect, emotions and body.’