Subj: acting
Date: 10/8/99 12:02:31 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: KEVIN4VFT
To: KEVIN4VFT

Today's Lesson from The Outsider
by Colin Wilson
Who am I?--This is the Outsider's final problem. Well, who precisely is he? 'Man is a bourgeois compromise', a half-way house. But a half-way house towards what? The superman? We have seen that the superman is not a gigantic piece of Nietzschean crankery, but a valid poetic concept that develops from the same urges as the saint and spiritual reformer. But 'the great man is a play-actor of his own ideals', and you cannot act well unless you have a clear idea of the part you are going to play. So when Tolstoy's madman wakes up in his carriage with a nightmarish sense of horror, and the question What am I? then the road towards the superman, or the saint or the artist of genius, is temporarily blocked up. The question of Identity lies across it.




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