The Outsider

Product Information

Coulthard, Philip. The Lurker at the Indifference Threshold: Feral Phenomenology for the 21st Century (2019) Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780995597822 Nicolas Tredell Novels to Some Purpose: the fiction of Colin Wilson (2015) Paupers' Press, . ISBN 9780956866363 Hard to believe? Look at all the bad habits among friends, family... and yourself. Burn out shadows us. It is impossible for me to be objective about this book as it had such an influence on my life! I read it when I was 21 and identified with the outsider theme. It had me reading most of the books this precocious autodidact quoted in his rambling thesis. I was particularly fascinated by his outline of Gurdjieff and this led me to join a Gurdjieff Group, convinced I had found the solution to my problems. I hadn't but that's another story! Or consider the view that man is a stranger or alien in the world. On the conventional religious view one can understand roughly what is meant by this. Man’s soul, which is separable from his body, is either a fragmented part of the world-soul and must return to the One from which it descended, or, cast into the natural world, its supernatural end is reunion with God, its creator. But if an individual surrenders this view, and, like most of Mr. Wilson’s characters, repudiates the dogmas of immortality and resurrection, what home can he possibly conceive man to have other than the natural world of which he is a part, to be sure a distinctive part, but as dependent upon other existing things as the animals and stones in the field?

Wilson was born in Leicester to Arthur, a shoemaker, and his wife, Hattie, who passed on her love of reading. "My mother did not particularly enjoy being married, any more than my father did," he wrote in a memoir. Wilson went to a local technical school, where he did well at physics and chemistry, and left at 16 to work in a wool factory. He had spells as a laboratory assistant, tax clerk, labourer and hospital porter. Vehemently alienated from all materialistic and collective life, he grew obsessed, he said, with the notion of being a Buddhist tathagata (truth-seeking wanderer). Taylor, Brett (2018). "Colin Wilson's Idiosyncratic Literary Legacy". Skeptical Inquirer. 42 (2): 54–56. Programme for A View From A Bridge at the Comedy Theatre. The New Watergate Theatre Club was a ruse to get past the censors who had banned the play in the UK. Trowell, Michael. Colin Wilson, the positive approach (1990), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-25-X Hmm. The most engaging part of his book is the factual stuff, about his early struggle to be a writer and his relationship with Joy and their children. Where it drags is when he gets on to his ideas. His philosophy is basically existentialism with non-rational excrescences and characterised by bizarre nomenclature - Faculty X, Upside Downness, Peak Experiences, Right Men, The Dominant Five Per Cent, King Rats. It seems to constitute an attempt to classify human feelings and behaviour as written by a Martian who has never met an Earthling. This is, of course, Wilson's weakness and also, in a way, his charm - he has no understanding of other people whatever. When I ask if he would say he is low in emotional intelligence, he readily agrees: 'That is fair, yes.'

Become a Member

On Christmas Day, 1954, alone in his room, Wilson sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He described his feelings as follows:

the outsider" ،و الذي يعني أيضا "الدخيل" . على أنني إن أمكن لي أن أعطي صورة فنية تلخص حالة اللامنتمي و موقفه من الحياة قبل أن أشرع بتلخيص سماته، لن أجد أفضل من لوحة "الصرخة" لإدفارد ميونش كي تقوم بمهمة ترك المجال لكم بتخمين طبيعة اللامنتمي . Life had bitten away my good intentions without ceasing, so started to SERIOUSLY look at my life objectively. There must be a literary soulmate out there... Rapatahana, Vaughan. More than the Existentialist Outsider: reflections on the work of Colin Wilson (2019), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780995597839 The success of The Outsider notwithstanding, Wilson's second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957), was universally panned by critics although Wilson himself claimed it was a more comprehensive book than the first one. While The Outsider was focused on documenting the subject of mental strain and near-insanity, Religion and the Rebel was focused on how to expand our consciousness and transform us into visionaries. Time magazine published a review, headlined "Scrambled Egghead", that pilloried the book. [16] Undaunted, Wilson continued to expound his positive "new" existentialism in the six philosophical books known as "The Outsider Cycle", all written within the first ten years of his literary career. These books were summarised by Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). When the book was re-printed in 1980 as The New Existentialism, Wilson wrote: "If I have contributed anything to existentialism – or, for that matter, to twentieth century thought in general, here it is. I am willing to stand or fall by it." Characters are then brought to the fore (including the title character from Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf). These are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre's Nausea is herein the key text – and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized.Wilson, who never attended college but was an omnivorous reader, found himself drawn to the experience of certain key figures of the modern world: Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and T. E. Lawrence. They are Outsiders, men whose lives of undisputed genius and often self-destructive violence set them apart from the ordinary. All stood for truth, but the sensitivity and awareness that enabled them to discover the truth also caused them great suffering. All had low “pain thresholds” (a term Wilson borrowed from William James) which prevented them from slipping into the spiritual sleepiness that pervaded their civilization. Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade; A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen Fifties. London: Peter Owen Ltd.