Tag Archives: Melancholia

Writing about Colin Wilson’s, The Outsider, recently reinforced for me a main pericope within its pages—that this “Outsider” is someone who sees “too deep and too much” into the nature of reality and as a result suffers from a lingering existential crisis. Wilson’s main protagonists are prominent figures in literature like the early Romantics, Blake, Keats and Wordsworth; also with philosophers like Nietzsche, and artists like the dancer Nijinsky and Van Goth the painter and visionaries like H.G. Wells. In his subsequent publication, Religion and the Rebel, Wilson says that these “Outsiders” are like “pimples appearing on the face of civilization” and that they are never prone to resigning themselves to the “insider” malaise of conventionality, or what the Zennist recently described as “consensus reality.” As a result, many of them succumbed to the depths of despair—some falling into madness like Nietzsche and Nijinsky, and some even committing suicide like Van Goth. What is it about the essential nature of these “Outsiders”, possessing great creative talent and keen insight into what really makes things tick, while at the same time feeling the eternal pangs of seeing “too deep and too much.” There was a term very much in vogue one time in creative circles that aptly describes this “Outsider” condition, and that is Melancholia. read more