Freedom comes from unconscious discipline of the will

COLIN WILSON

One hot day in 1954 I was hitch-hiking up the Great North Road to Peterbo-rough, in a state of fatigue and 'life-devaluation' I didn't want to go to Peterborough - it was a duty call - and neither did I particularly want to return to London, where I was working in a dreary plastics factory.

I felt so depressed that I did not even feel grateful when a lorry finally stopped for me. After a mile or so, there was a knocking sound from his gearbox, and he explained that he would have to pull in to a garage to have it repaired. So I got out and went on hitching.

A second lorry stopped for me. Again, I felt no gratitude or relief. But after ten minutes or so, an absurd coincidence happened; there was an odd knocking noise from his gearbox too, and he said: 'It looks as if I'll have to drop you off at the next garage.'

And for the first time that day I felt a positive emotion, a feeling of 'Oh no!', and a lot of unprintable things. However, he drove on cautiously, and found that the noise stopped when he drove at less than 20 miles an hour.

After half an hour of this - both of us listening with strained attention for the noise - he said: 'Well, I think we'll make it if we keep going at this speed.' And I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of relief and delight. And I caught myself felling it, and noticed its absurdity.

Nothing had been 'added to me' in the last half hour, nothing given. All that had happened was that I had been threatened with inconvenience, and the threat had been removed. The threat had stimulated me, aroused my latent will-power.

I formulated this recognition rather clumsily, in the words: 'There is a margin of the human mind that can be stimulated by pain or inconvenience, but which is indifferent to pleasure.' And as we were passing through the town of St Neots, I labeled it 'the St Neot margin', so I wouldn't forget it.

It was an absolutely fundamental recognition. It meant that 'life devaluation' - the opposite of freedom - is due to our curious laziness, to a childish 'spoiltness' that gets resentful and bored in the face of minor problems. And freedom - the moment of vision, of poetry - is due to a certain unconscious discipline of the will.

The vision, the freedom, comes from a subconscious region inside us. And yet, in an odd way, we have power over this subconscious region. Discipline and effort are all-important.
Once I had my clue, other things began to fall into place.

There was Ramakrishna, who received his first 'vision of God' when about to plunge a sword into himself. There was Raskolnikov, with his thought that he would prefer to live on a narrow ledge for ever rather than die at once.

There was Graham Greene, who tells how in his teens he suffered from a perpetual and total boredom, which he would dissipate by taking his brother's revolver on to Berkhamsted Common where he played Russian roulette: that is, inserted one bullet, spun the chambers, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger.

When there was only a click, 'it was as if a light had been turned on … I felt that life contained an infinite number of possibilities'. And Sartre was getting at the same thing when he said that he had never felt so free as under constant threat of death in the German occupation.

Excerpted from The Outsider