There is a sublime line in one of Vincent van Gogh's many letters to his brother where Vincent refers to himself as a home with a great, warm fire that passersby neither see nor need. It captures the artist's loneliness, isolation, and deep longing.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

It also establishes van Gogh as an unnoticed being, ignored (or at worst shunned/avoided) by his fellow man.

In 1956, an intelligent and young Londoner, Colin Wilson (June 26, 1931 – December 5, 2013), named this man (and Van Gogh specifically) The Outsider in his overnight literary sensation of the same name.

"The Outsider is not sure who he is. 'He has found an "I," but it is not his true "I".' His main business is to find his way back to himself. This is not so easy.

"Self-Portrait" by Vincent van Gogh. This self-portrait is widely thought to be his last, painted in 1889. Musée D'Orsay Collection.

As Wilson tries to make sense of the nature of the Outsider and his purpose of existence, he supposes that such a human must spend his days not only in self-understanding but in self-expression.

"Writing is a natural medium for self-analysis," Wilson observes as he connects the character of the Outsider throughout literature and to the authors and artists themselves.

Van Gogh's painting has the Outsider's characteristic: it is the laboratory refuse of a man who treated his own life as an experiment in living; it faithfully records moods and development of vision in the manner of a Bildungsroman. To experts on art, this way of treating Van Gogh must seem completely without bearing on his importance as a painter.

"The emotion is important," Wilson wrote of van Gogh's "A Farmhouse Near Auvers," one of two canvases van Gogh left unfinished, "It is not just a sentimental gushing about nature, but an emotion that could only correspond to some recognized awareness of the nature of life itself." Tate Collection.

The nature of an artist as someone set aside from society, in that they take an aspect of their fragile creative self and set it apart to create, is nothing new. Novelist Margaret Atwood wrote beautifully about the fierce duality of the writing life, while Annie Dillard argued for the isolated consciousness of the writer. More than merely being alone, artists often seek an existence separate from others to work and thrive. It might be extreme introversion, this tendency to pull energy and insight from the complexities of one's own mind rather than conversations with others. (I like to think The Examined Life is a refuge for introverts, but all are welcome.)

And yet, Wilson's Outsider is a complete being. Someone who lives, thinks, and exists apart—a savage-bordering existence but a full one. And, Wilson argues, a more honest one.

The Outsider's case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, and to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

That is his case. But it is weakened by his obvious abnormality, his introversion. It looks, in fact, like an attempt at self-justification by a man who knows himself to be degenerate, diseased, and self-divided. There is certainly self-division.

This self-division, being what we think we need to be (i.e., socially acceptable) rather than who we need to be (tending to our own needs of creativity) - reaches an apotheosis in the case of Vaslav Nijinsky, a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer who, in 1919, at the age of 29, had a psychotic breakdown. Nijinsky was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia, as it was then understood, and placed in a mental institution. He died in 1950, unable to care for himself or even speak.

"Nijinsky understood himself well enough to know he needed to keep sane." Wilson wrote, "But he did not know how much suffering and frustration his mind could stand; the pain frightened him."

Wilson, however, uses other, non-mental health terms to describe what happened to Nijinksy, returning to this issue of a "self-divided";

In December 1917, the family moved to St. Moritz, and the last stage began. Nijinsky worked on the choreography of a new ballet and read a great deal; he and his wife went for long walks or went for sleigh rides or ski-ing. But the inactivity began to tell on Nijinsky; he needed something to do. He began to write a Diary, a sort of rambling exposition of his ideas on things in general and perfected a technique of drawing with curves and arcs.

Nijinsky's "curves and arcs" were devastating images of lines repeated upon themselves which Nijinsky described as the "eyes of the soldiers" coming to kill him. Wilson's interpretation that Nijinsky's psychosis was simply creative output from a bored, stable mind is not entirely Wilson's fault, however. The Diaries were initially published by Nijinsky's wife, Romola, who redacted any passages that suggested the dancer's mental and physical collapse. The unexpurgated version shows not a man "perfecting arcs and circles" but one quickly slipping into psychosis.

And yet, as Wilson argues, Nijinsky does exhibit an overwhelming need to self-express as a means to liven the soul, awaken the deadened tissue, and perhaps, reclaim the communion with something larger than self as denied by society (back to Van Gogh's fire metaphor).

I wanted to speak, but my voice was so strong I could not speak, and I shouted. ‘I love everyone, and I want happiness!’ ‘I love everyone!’ ‘I want everyone.’ I cannot speak French, but I will learn it if I walk by myself. I want to speak loudly so that people will feel me. I want to love everyone, and therefore I want to speak all languages.
From The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky

What I applaud in The Outsider is its rejection of what we've become accustomed to: a label-making mindset. Complexity must exist, opposition to conformity even. We are all multitudes, to borrow from Walt Whitman, who was an outsider in his day, publishing free verse amid conformity. Had Emerson, a revered social leader in the New England Transcendental movement, never reached out with recognition, would Whitman have remained an Outsider?

Wilson's The Outsider was an overnight sensation. Twenty years after its publication, Wilson revisited the effects of his book and suggested it contributed, unfortunately, to his own outsiderness:

T. S. Eliot told me I had achieved recognition in the wrong way; it was fatal to become known to too many people at once. The right way was to gradually achieve an audience of regular readers and slowly expand from there, if at all.

Colin Wilson. Photograph by Marc Hill.

Ultimately, Wilson's work reviews the Outsider as a creative in Western/Russian literature canon. How could Wilson's understanding be improved had he considered outsiders of race, gender, religion, and sexual preference, like Robert Mapplethorpe, Una Marson, James Baldwin, and Stephen Fry, to name a few?

I urge you to read The Outsider, not as anything definitive on mental health (his ultimate read - stated by me - is that people with severe mental health issues are simply 'different' and misunderstood) but rather as a way to make sense of and reconcile our conforming or outsider natures. Then accompany The Outsider with Oliver Sack's life-long pursuit to understand and give personhood to individuals lacking what others might consider human elements, as well as the lives of Francis Bacon and John Keats, artists who existed in the bosom of social belonging and still felt on the fringe. Bacon was deeply influenced by van Gogh and even copied some of van Gogh's canvases. Warming himself at the fire, I like to think.