The
outsider's basic problem is that he is stuck in a dreary, lukewarm
civilization that was created for the “average man,” a culture
based on mediocrity.
In Hesse's "Steppenwolf", the hero has temporarily abandoned the dream of the open road, with its
elusive prospects of far horizons which always turn out
to be as solid and ordinary as a backstreet in one's home town. Hesse is
honest enough to acknowledge that a man with a room of his own, a
sufficient income, and plenty of books, can still feel as maladjusted
as a romantic wanderer. This, I saw, was the main problem: Our
odd inability to stay in contact with reality.
Whenever
I returned from a few weeks on the open road, I had an odd feeling of
strength for a week or two; my home town no longer oppressed me. But
the strength would leak away and I would again feel vulnerable and
bored. What I wanted to discover was the basic discipline for
developing strength and objectivity.
The intensity of the poet's response to existence means that the poet is
obsessed by the need for contact with “the source of power and purpose” that lies inside us. All great poets become more spiritual as they attempt to
establish contact with this source.
Hesse's Steppenwolf has freedom, in
the physical and economic sense; so what is it that he lacks? I
knew that if I could answer this question, I would have solved one of
the basic problems of the century.
Steppenwolf
was Hesse's closest approach to a solution, because it was his
clearest statement of the problem. Why
had the author failed? It was because he kept looking for his
answer outside.
What
is wrong with Steppenwolf is that he has no purpose or
discipline. He sits in a passive state of mind, waiting to be
moved by another's genius. Without external challenge, he ceases
to make any effort. He becomes subject to that stringent spiritual law that says the
less you put into life, the less you get out of it.
The answer had to lie in a sense of inner purpose, and a rigid
self-discipline. And so out of these insights I began to fashion the ideas of
The Outsider.
-- Colin Wilson, from Three Essays: Hesse, Reich, Borges
