The Outsider...

[Trollax]

The Outsider by Colin Wilson

Anyone ever read it? I found a copy at the secondhand bookstore in Maitland the other day. It's sort of a neo-existentialism based around the idea that losing one's pace in the world is a desirable thing. That perhaps our world and its values are what is out of synch and not the people who inhabit it.

My main gripe with the book however is the absolutism Wilson reverts to when using definitions of concepts and ideas. In one particular passage he affirms that it is more desirable to be active than happy because his working definition of happy is to be idle and content.

That aside however it is a well written and insightful book. The book went through 9 printings in one year. so it must have been pretty popular in england with the beatniks. I wonder if Greg and Kerry ever read it?

[Malaul]

Ive never heard of it

[MAxwellsstillademon]

Strange one Mr Wilson.... Came from nowhere in the early sixties, became a darling in the 'literati oh so london angry but attractive mmm corduroy' scene, wrote 'beyond the outsider' (more third way existentialism) and then the critics found out he never went to university, destroyed his standing as academic theorist and then it all went the shape of pear; RE recluse in Cornwall writing about ghosts and that.

Colin Wilson is actually to blame (in part) for my unbalanced meme structure, the whole concept of mans 'sickness' and his capability of 'peak experience' set one meandering through the now usual suspects... Reich, Maslow, the Romantics, Ouspensky right through to good ol uncle Bob. If you like the outsider may I be as bold to recomend 'the philosophers stone' Mr wilson playing at being lovecraft, silly but a great grasp of how man can use his occasional lucidity to 'cure' his sleeping soul/brain.

[Trollax]

I found a copy of beyond the outsider last week and the uni library has most of his books. It just take a while to find them among the other half million titles...

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