Unquotable Quotes: Outsiders and Odd Men - Xxviii
Unquotable quotes: Outsiders and Odd Men – XXVIII
for Colin Wilson (1931-1913)
regrets for the “provoked” faux pas
To each his own: to Colin Wilson his alienated creators, doers and thinkers – Lawrence of Arabia, Nijinsky, Van Gogh (to name but a sample), but what about those who sweated their lives out within soft screen to hard covers: James Mason’s “Johnny McQueen” in Carol Reed’s version of Green’s Odd Man Out; Steinbeck’s mute mice and merciless military men in Viva Zapata; King Wen of Chou trapped within the hexagram Ming Yi for six years in the tyrant’s dungeons made ultimate sense of stray lines on tortoise shells or El Mancho of Lepanto languishing for years in Algerian stone quarries for want of 30 thousand ducats hatched his quixotic plot to appease those who let their whims overwhelm them; like a Ho who would not let a defeated people go down on their knees to superior fire power; like a Gandhiji who elevated and enshrined hundreds of millions of Dalit sous-hommes in articles of human rights in the sub-continent’s Constitution; like the Midnight Oil’s wail to keep sleeping on while their beds burn Down Under: ‘A fact’s a fact/It belongs to them/Let’s give it back’; like Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai come to the rescue of guileless peasants at the mercy of brigands and the waywardness of seasons; like a Mandela who steered his beaten down and trampled apartheid victims into the clear ground of fairplay in the aftermath of Botha detention; like a Lenin unwilling to let the Tsarist insouciance feed on the under-fed and over-worked proletariat corpse: like Mao who took his diehard followers on the Long March to re-possess his ravaged country equally from traitors and infiltrators and scheming conqueror hoards; like the general who turned the tables on his colonial masters to found the nucleus of the Republic now in Washington; like a Lincoln who forestalled Jefferson’s segregationist and cleansing plans of repatriation to bind the Union in mixed blood; like the ever-faithful Castro ready to sacrifice in bon-fires his women and children to face the Roman conqueror onslaught….
All all “outsiders” who harbour the spirit of the “odd man out” in their psyches and willing at all cost to pay the ultimate price for wanting in their dreams to change this incorrigible world in the grasp of bigoted profiteers….
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2016
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