by Colin Wilson
The worst insight came during the long Easter holiday of 1948. I had been reading far too much—out of boredom—and spent a whole day reading Janko Lavrin's little book on Russian literature. It is not very cheerful reading, with its descriptions of the stories of Chekhov, Saltykov's Golovlyov Family, Goncharov's Oblomov. I went into the kitchen to switch on the stove to make tea, and had a blackout. It was a strange sensation. I stood there, fully conscious, clutching the stove to keep upright, and yet conscious of nothing but blackness. There was an electric sensation in my brain, so that I could readily have believed that I had been given an electric shock. It was as if something were flowing through me, and I had an insight of what lay on the other side of consciousness. It looked like an eternity of pain. When my vision cleared, I switched on the kettle and went into the other room. I could not be certain what I had seen, but I was afraid of it. It seemed as if I were the bed of a river, and the current was all pain. I thought I had seen the final truth that life does not lead to anything; it is on escape from something, and the 'something' is a horror that lies on the other side of consciousness. I could understand what Kurtz had seen in Heart of Darkness. All the metaphysical doubts of years seemed to gather to a point, in one realization: What use is such truth? Later in the day, I went out cycling; there seemed to be a supreme irony in every manifestation of life that I saw. Eliot's lines from The Waste Land ran in my head:
On Margate sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands. . .
Later, I wrote about it in my journal, with a sense that the futility had now come its full circle; for until then, writing in my journal had been the one action that did not seem futile; now I was recording my certainty of the futility of everything. And yet I recorded it with a compulsive sense that everything should be told. I think I recognized how far the source of these periods of exhaustion was physical. It seemed a further reason for nihilistic unbelief. All things depended upon mere physical energy. Therefore, there was no will.
I had seen the word 'nihilism' somewhere, and asked the English master at school what it meant. 'Belief in nothing,' he told me, and at once I thought I had found a name for my own state of mind. It was not just lack of belief in anything—it was active belief in Nothing. I cannot now understand the significance that that word 'Nothing' carried for me then. I remember, though, how I discovered the Tao Te Ching in a compilation called The Bible of the World, and read:
There is a thing inherent and natural,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Motionless and fathomless,
It stands alone and never changes;
It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted.
It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe
I do not know its name.
If I am forced to give it a name,
I call it Tao, and I name it Supreme.
Supreme means going on;
Going on means going far;
Going far means returning.
Therefore Tao is supreme; heaven is supreme; earth is supreme; and man is also supreme. There are in the universe four things supreme, and man is one of them.
I was certain that 'Tao' was my positive principle of Nothing-ness. The line 'Going far means returning' I took to mean a recognition that all thought chases its own tail: vanitas vanitatum. As to the last section, with its 'Man is supreme', my already Swiftian views on the stupidity and futility of human beings led me to decide that 'Man' was a mistranslation for 'I'; that, in fact, Lao-tse was merely expressing his inability to escape complete solipsism. I could not (and still do not) accept the view that Taoism is a humanism.
My solipsism I had arrived at by reading of Berkeley and Hume in some textbook of philosophy. I remember explaining to a group of friends in the playground at school why a bar of chocolate existed only in their own minds. Berkeley, added to Einstein and Eliot's Hollow Men, made a vertiginous mixture.
Then, quite suddenly, my 'nihilism' received a check. A day came when I seriously contemplated suicide. It was during the long, hot summer of 1947, when I was working as a laboratory assistant. I arrived home one evening in a state of nervous exhaustion, and tried to 'write away' my tension in my journal. I found writing simply an aid to reflection, a crutch for my thoughts. And after about an hour of writing, I found my resistance slowly returning. I thought clearly: This must cease immediately; I will not go on living like this. I was all too familiar with these revivals of strength that was sucked away again the next day. Then I saw the answer: Kill myself.
It cheered me immensely. I cycled to my evening class with a feeling of having at last learned to master my destiny. I arrived late, and listened to the professor's sarcasms without interest. It was our evening for analytical chemistry practice. A glass tray contained a mixture of powders which we had to separate. I took some in my watch glass, sniffed it, tested it in a bunsen flame, and then went into the other room to the reagent shelves. Glass bottles contained cobalt chloride, silver nitrate, potassium iodide and various acids. In the middle there was a bottle of hydrocyanic acid. As I took it down, my mind made a leap, and for an instant I was living in the future, with a burning in my throat and in the pit of my stomach. In that moment, I was suddenly supremely aware that what I wanted was not less life, but more. The sensation of drinking the acid was so clear that it was almost as if it had actually taken place. I stood there for a second with the bottle in my hand, but the experience was so vivid that it seemed to last for hours. Then, as someone stood beside me, I put it back, vaguely, as if I had taken it by mistake, and reached down for the methyl red. In one second, I had seen something that I have striven to see all my life since.
My insight that evening did not last for long, perhaps because I was too anxious to cling to it. I remember the feeling of having been suddenly awakened to the possibilities of my own will power, and the dreamlike quality of the rest of the evening. And when I got home, I did not try to write about it. For the first time, I had a sense of something too real to write about. Later, when I came to analyse the experience in my journal, I recognized it as one of many such experiences which I had had, differing only in degree. I did not discover Hermann Hesse until six years later; I am certain that if I had, Sleppenwolf would have become the bible of my teens. Hesse recognizes these fluctuations of insight as being the very stuff of the artist's life. At any time in my adolescence, asked what is the final goal of life, I would have replied without hesitation: Insight. Later deliberations have made me less certain.
My year as a civil servant was the dreariest I had yet known. In my journal, I wrote that the chief qualification for a tax collector is an ability to simulate work. I hated pretending to file Schedule A forms that did not need filing. I envied Shaw when I read in Hesketh Pearson's biography that he had been so efficient as an office boy that his employers had refused to accept his resignation. I was frankly incompetent and outspoken about my dislike of the job. I took half a dozen books to the office every day and read them when I had finished filing. In slack periods I slipped out to the local library and stayed there for hours at a time. I was an appallingly bad office boy. The head of the office was a pleasant, middle-aged Londoner; when he had nothing to do he asked me into his office, and 'talked philosophy'—which meant that he told me long, rambling stories about his life to illustrate his own incorrigibly optimistic point of view. Whenever I had to be reprimanded for some oversight or piece of incompetence—which was pretty frequently—he delegated the job to his second-in-command (a good-tempered Scot, who also took a lenient view of my inefficiency). After six months in the Inland Revenue office, I took the examination for establishment in the Civil Service. I can still remember my despair when I received the letter congratulating me on having passed. I celebrated my establishment by writing a long, pessimistic story about the end of the world; I produced it in a single eight-hour sitting one Saturday afternoon. No one eve
r liked the story, and I destroyed it later. It was distinctly indebted to Wells's The Star.
The only occurrence of importance in my year as a civil servant was my definite abandonment of Dickens as a master of style. One day, in a state of boredom and disgust, I began a story in the 'stream of consciousness' style and found that it expressed my emotions so well that from then on I experimented with it continually.
I had always detested the idea of National Service, but my period in the RAF came as a relief. The first eight weeks of square-bashing were so hectic that I had no time to think, and my mental faculties enjoyed the vacation. This was followed by a tedious month spent in a Birmingham training camp, where I had little to do except learn to be a Clerk, General Duties. I had not chosen it myself—the clerking job—and I resented it. Finally, I was posted to a station near Nottingham, and given a little office all to myself, where I was as bored as I had been in the tax office. One day, in a state of wild irritation, I was thoroughly rude to the adjutant, who, instead of sending for the guard, asked me sympathetically why I disliked office work so much. He hoped to get me transferred to some medical unit where I might exercise my incompetence among malingerers who were hoping to escape parades. He had been unlucky in having had a series of inefficient clerks whose oversights had brought unending complaints from GHQ, and hoped to exchange me for better or worse. Somehow, he overshot his mark, and a month later I found myself on my way home with my discharge papers. The whole story is unprintable. I left the RAF with a delighted recognition that one's salvation can lie in proceeding to extremes of indiscretion and ignoring the possible consequences. It was the first time I had had a chance of putting Mr Polly's advice into practice, and it had worked.
The sheer joy of walking out of the RAF gave me a great sense of emotional release. I determined that I would never go back into an office. I sent in my resignation to the Civil Service, and received a long letter pointing out the gravity of what I was doing, and asking me to reconsider it. I stayed at home for a month until my discharge pay ran out, and then left home with a haversack and hitchhiked north. I had intended to find work, but found myself so reluctant to begin that I delayed until the last of my money was spent. Then I hitchhiked home again. In my fortnight's wanderings I had approached a dozen or so theatres with the idea of training to act in repertory. Luckily, no one had any time for me. At home I worked for a fortnight on a building site, and then set out again, this time travelling southward, I wanted to spend a night at Stonehenge—for no particular reason—and then head for Southampton, where I hoped I might be able to get a boat to India. Two RAF policemen saw me emerging from a haystack wearing a grubby RAF uniform (without shoulder flashes) and arrested me. I explained that I was not a deserter, but I had no discharge papers and they didn't believe me. I was sent home again.
I took a number of jobs in quick succession. I worked on a fairground, selling tickets for a gambling machine. I met a girl with whom I carried on an affair for the rest of the year. It was my first sexual experience, and it contributed to the tremendously optimistic state of mind that I experienced all that year. I took a building job that involved wheeling a thousand barrow loads of concrete a day up an inclined plank and along a trench to a half-finished building. After a week I handed in my notice and took a job in some government scheme for training farm labourers. For the rest of that summer, I worked on various farms in Leicestershire, learning to milk cows—electrically and by hand—make hay, shovel cow dung into barrows, harness and unharness horses, and dislike the English countryside intensely. Luckily, my dislike did not survive my period as a farm hand.
I had ceased to read Eliot; I even gave away all his works, alleging that he was 'morbid' and 'anti-life'. Instead, I carried Synge around with me, and read Herrick, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Blake—and, of course, Shaw. I preferred Joyce's Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus. My interest in comparative religion also developed, and I read Buddhist and Hindu texts for the first time. My first reading of the Bhagavad-Gita was so important to me that I had my copy bound in leather and carried it around with me wherever I went. The idea of entering a monastery also became increasingly attractive. Not necessarily a Christian monastery—I did not count myself a Christian, in the sense of believing in redemption by Christ. Rather, the monastery symbolized serenity and time for meditation. Yeats's 'storm-beaten old watch-tower' would have done as well. My most acute problem, I felt, was to discover a means of escaping work, escaping the complications of having to find food and drink and a change of clothes. I started instruction in Catholicism, feeling that to become a Catholic would be the first step toward a monastery. But what I read of the strenuous life in monasteries discouraged me. My final disqualification, of course, was my failure to see any need for Christ. The need for God I could understand, and the need for a religion; I could even sympathize with devotees like Suso or St Francis, who wove fantasies around the cross, the nails, and all the other traditional symbols. But ultimately I could not accept the need for redemption by a Saviour. To pin down the idea of salvation to one point in space and time seemed a naïve kind of anthropomorphism, like portraying Lao-tse's Unchanging with a beard and white hair.
The solution seemed simpler. As an adolescent, I had been puzzled and made wretched by a feeling that sudden moods of vision and insight—what Wordsworth calls 'the glory and the freshness of a dream'—could not be retained or recalled at will. The Buddhist and Hindu scriptures prescribed simple disciplines for retaining them. It was a short step from there to deciding that most men lead such dull and second-rate lives because the concept of a spiritual and intellectual discipline is so foreign to them. Even the men who talk about the need for discipline never practise it; at any rate, this was what I felt at the time.
By the time I had been back in civilian life for six months, I had begun to see my personal problems more clearly. Previously, my chief enemy had been boredom. I thought I had found an answer when I left the RAF. Hitchhiking into London from Wendover one day, lines from Rupert Brooke running in my head:
Thank God, that's done! and I'll take the road,
Quit of my youth and you,
The Roman road to Wendover
By Tring and Lilley Hoo,
As a free man may do . . .
it had suddenly seemed that the answer was to keep on the move: never to stay anywhere long enough to get bored.[1] I felt that nothing counted except to achieve the intensity of a visionary, and that the only way to do this was to care more about it than anything else; to be willing to sacrifice everything to the ideal.
It did not work out. Wandering entailed too much 'thought for the morrow'; it made life a perpetual anxiety. In its way, it was as bad as being drained of one's vitality in an office job. I wanted to be allowed to meditate and write; but wandering gave me no time or freedom to meditate, while working at a 'regular job' destroyed the inclination. The alternatives were equally poisonous. By the end of the summer, I had come to realize that the intolerable problem of subsistence was still unsolved. Of only one thing I was certain: it was no use staying at home and hoping. My will had to be constantly stimulated by new challenges.
In September 1950 I decided to go to France. It was not that I wanted to write in a garret on the Left Bank, or seek Murger's vie de bohème off the rue du Bac. My desire to write had almost died out, and I felt that intellect was a disease keeping me away from life. I was not sure what I hoped to find in France, but any movement was better than sitting still in Leicester. I set off to hitchhike to Dover, working for a week near Canterbury picking hops, and then for a fortnight near Dover, picking potatoes. During this second job, the farmer allowed me to sleep in an old cottage that he used for storing the potatoes; I slept in an upstairs room, settling myself in the corner of the floor that looked soundest. Most of the floor-boards were missing in the rest of the room; I always installed myself before dark, and then refrained from moving in case I fell through into the cellar. At the end of the fortnight, I crossed to France.<
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Altogether, the two months I spent there confirmed my feeling that a life without security is dreary and demoralizing. In Paris I lived for a time in the 'Akademia' of Raymond Duncan, brother of the dancer Isadora. He was a naïvely egotistic old American who printed his own Whitmanesque poems on a printing press that only had capital letters and issued a weekly newspaper called New-Paris-York, written entirely by himself in bad French. His long grey hair was fastened by a band around his forehead and he wore a toga and sandals. He preached a philosophy which he called 'actionalism', which was a blend of Rousseauism and the commonsense practical beliefs of a self-made man who had once been a millionaire. He supported himself—like some mediaeval craftsman—by making things with his hands, and taught his 'disciples' (of whom I was enrolled as one) to do the same. He preached that a poet would be a better poet for being able to mend a lavatory cistern or dig a trench with a pick. For a few weeks I helped him to print his newspaper, and in exchange was given three vegetarian meals a day and a couch to sleep on (I had my own blankets). But he soon found me out—that the three meals a day meant more to me than the lectures which he delivered twice a week to selected audiences. He gave me a stiff dressing down, in which he told me that I was an adventurer and an imposter, and gave me twenty-four hours to find new lodgings. I was not resentful; it was true that my own approach had nothing in common with the diluted Platonism that he preached. When I had first come to the 'Akademia' I had hoped to interest Duncan in my own attitude; but it was useless. He was goodnatured and easygoing, but old; too old to be interested in me; too old even to talk to me for more than a few minutes at a time. So, after a while, his hospitality began to weigh on my conscience, and the summary dismissal brought an element of relief.
