The Outsider

I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself.’ (Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, p. 120.)

Nietzsche himself began as an other-worlder, agreeing with Schopenhauer that ‘Life is a sorry affair’, and that the best way to spend it is in reflecting on it. We began this study of the Outsider with a man who spent his evenings looking through a hole in his wall and ‘reflecting’ on what he saw.

This is penetrating commentary; but then, it is only a reversal of Hesse’s statement that every man has a residue of unfulfilment at the bottom of him: boredom, unfulfilment, they amount to the same thing.
They do not know themselves. They live in prison. How can an individual hope to escape the general destiny of futility?