Something to read from something I am reading:
“It is a longing for the heroic, for a greater seriousness of life than ordinary human beings know about. And when a man has this appetite for seriousness, and cannot see it reflected in any of the human beings he knows, he must either submit to their standards and forget his dreams, or deliberately cut himself off from them — make himself an Outsider until he has found a way of thinking and living that gives him scope for his deeper seriousness. Works of imagination will inspire him, especially works about ambitious young men struggling to escape their circumstances, like Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir or Joyce’s Portrait. It is this longing for the heroic that makes the Outsider; and his greatest enemy is ‘nausea’: discouragement, boredom, and the pettiness of so much modern life. “
— Colin Wilson, Religion and the Rebel