Colin Wilson dies.

[Bax-of-Delights]

Sad to report the death of Colin Wilson on December 5th. It would appear that no mention has been made on the BBC (which would appear to be reporting nothing but Mandela at present) nor have any of the "quality" papers done an obit.

http://orthosphere.org/2013/12/06/colin-wilson-dies-at-age-eighty-one/

[Beef Oven!]

Sad to report the death of Colin Wilson on December 5th. It would appear that no mention has been made on the BBC (which would appear to be reporting nothing but Mandela at present) nor have any of the "quality" papers done an obit.
http://orthosphere.org/2013/12/06/co...ge-eighty-one/

I have never read anything by Wilson, any recommendation for a good place to start?

RIP CW

[amateur51]

I have never read anything by Wilson, any recommendation for a good place to start?

RIP CW

BoD's link contains:

"An excellent introduction to Wilson’s thinking is the immediate sequel to The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel (1957), whose chapters on literature, history, and philosophy constitute an important polemic against the deadening cultural assumptions of the mid-Twentieth Century. Wilson had befriended Albert Camus just before the latter’s fatal automobile accident. Wilson’s work may be seen as an Anglo-Saxon parallel to Camus’ work although Wilson, in contrast to Camus, was never distracted by politics."

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

another sadness; too many at present

i read his books breathlessly as a teenager and then forgot him really ... but he should be remembered for the Outsider and his part in the developing zeitgeist ... i was already reading Camus because my chum was doing him at A Level French and i used to read most of his set books in translation, but Wilson certainly spun the wheel harder of my interest in things and writers existential ..... it was his interest in the dark side that lost me ...

[Bryn]

Sad to report the death of Colin Wilson on December 5th. It would appear that no mention has been made on the BBC (which would appear to be reporting nothing but Mandela at present) nor have any of the "quality" papers done an obit.
http://orthosphere.org/2013/12/06/co...ge-eighty-one/

Unlike Madiba, Wilson rated himself far, far higher than others did.

[Beef Oven!]

BoD's link contains:

"An excellent introduction to Wilson’s thinking is the immediate sequel to The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel (1957), whose chapters on literature, history, and philosophy constitute an important polemic against the deadening cultural assumptions of the mid-Twentieth Century. Wilson had befriended Albert Camus just before the latter’s fatal automobile accident. Wilson’s work may be seen as an Anglo-Saxon parallel to Camus’ work although Wilson, in contrast to Camus, was never distracted by politics."

Thank you.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

another sadness; too many at present

i read his books breathlessly as a teenager and then forgot him really ... but he should be remembered for the Outsider and his part in the developing zeitgeist ..... it was his interest in the dark side that lost me ...

Exactly my own reaction, Calum.

[MrGongGong]

Wilsons book on the occult is interesting
(or was when I read it in the 1980's)

and I remember reading The Outsider and loved it
probably a good place to start ?

[Serial_Apologist]

Ritual in the Dark was my introduction to Wilson's writings; with its portrayal of London around the time of the Diaghilev exhibition in the early 50s and the characters one might meet it made me long to escape boarding school and move to a bedsit in Notting Hill, as she then was. The Gerard Sorme, Prokofiev's 5th symphony-loving character Wilson was to develop in later novels gets himself picked up by a gay man at the exhibition, and slowly it dawns upon him that this character is a Jack the Ripper-type murderer. The depiction of a gay man was in this sense ambivalent, and having long ago lost my copy of the book and not got a replacement, the impression remains of an attempt to square some kind of circle in Wilson's theories about some supposed capacity in violence to transcend an everyday consciousness that keep us all mired in the mundane, rather than demonstrating gay men to be dangerous psychopaths - a bold suggestion at a time when homophobia was probably at its zenith in Britain. I then went on to read The Outsider, and I guess I have to thank Wilson inasmuch that my provincial upbringing would never otherwise have introduced me to such names as Sartre, Ouspensky, Nietsche and Kierkegaarde. He would have strongly disagreed with my consequential life-choices, for sure.