The Essential Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

the meaning of existence . I was like the others . . . I said with them: The ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn't feel that it existed . . . And then suddenly existence had unveiled itself. It had lost the look of an abstract category; it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into existence . . . These objects, they inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less imposingly, more dryly, in a more abstract way . . .
    He has reached the rock bottom of self-contempt; even things negate him. We are all familiar enough with his experience in the face of other human beings; a personality or a conviction can impose itself in spite of resistance; even the city itself, the confusion of traffic and human beings in Regent Street, can overwhelm a weak personality and make it feel insignificant. Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality—Hume's bugbear—has collapsed; consequently there are no adventures . The biography of Rollebon would have been another venture of 'bad faith', for it would have imposed a necessity on Rollebon's life that was not really there; the events didn't really cohere and follow one another like a story; only blindness to the fact of raw, naked existence could ever produce the illusion that they did.
    What then? Is there no causality, no possible meaning? Sartre summarizes life: '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.
    Yet Roquentin had had his glimpse of meaning and order; in Some of These Days . There was meaning, causation, one note following inevitably on another. Roquentin wonders: why shouldn't he create something like that; something rhythmic, purposive—a novel, perhaps, that men could read later and feel: There was an attempt to bring order into chaos? He will leave Havre and the life of Rollebon; there must be another way of living that is not futile. The Journal comes to an end on this note.

    Roquentin lives like Barbusse's hero; his room is almost the limit of his consciousness. But he has gone further and deeper than the hole-in-the-wall man. His attitude has reached the dead-end of Wells; 'Man is a useless passion': that could be taken as a summary of Mind at the End of Its Tether . Complete denial, as in Eliot's Hollow Men : We are the hollow men, we are the salauds . Roquentin is in the position of the hero of The Country of the Blind . He alone is aware of the truth, and if all men were aware of it, there would be an end of life. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But his kingship is kingship over nothing. It brings no powers and privileges, only loss of faith and exhaustion of the power to act. Its world is a world without values.
    This is the position that Barbusse's Outsider has brought us to. It was already explicit in that desire that stirred as he saw the swaying dresses of the women; for what he wanted was not sexual intercourse, but some indefinable freedom, of which the women, with their veiled and hidden nakedness, are a symbol. Sexual desire was there, but not alone; aggravated, blown-up like a balloon, by a resentment that stirred in revolt against the bewilderment of hurrying Paris with its well-dressed women. 'Yet in spite of this I desire some compensation.' In spite of the civilization that has impressed his insignificance on him until he is certain that 'he has nothing and he deserves nothing', in spite of this he feels a right to . . . to what? Freedom? It is a misused word. We examine L'Enfer in vain for a definition of it. Sartre and Wells have decided that man is never free; he is simply too stupid to recognize this. Then to what precisely is it that the Outsider has an inalienable right?
    The question must take us into a new field: of Outsiders who have had some insight into the nature