The Outsider

Product Information

Dalgleish, Tim The Guerilla Philosopher: Colin Wilson and Existentialism (1993), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-47-0

Through the works and lives of various artists – including H. G. Wells ( Mind at the End of Its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker ( The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and George Gurdjieff – Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society's effect on him. Stanley, Colin (ed). Reflections on the work of Colin Wilson: Proceedings of the Second International Colin Wilson Conference, University of Nottingham July 6-8, 2018 (2019). Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978-1-5275-2774-4

Colin Wilson

This fascinated me. It obviously did the dog no good whatsoever to know that its master was on his way home. It just sat there. But it clearly possessed some natural faculty of “tuning in”. A new six-part film documentary about the life and works of Colin Wilson was premiered during the third International Colin Wilson Conference in Nottingham, UK, on September 3, 2023. Luminously intelligent . . . A real contribution to our understanding of our deepest predicament.” —Philip Toynbee Why do I suppose the book did so well? I feel I owe this partly to a curious historical phenomenon: that in the last decades of every century, there is a sudden revival of interest in the paranormal. In the last years of the 16th century it was John Dee; a century later (incredibly) Sir Isaac Newton, who was a dedicated alchemist; a century later came Cagliostro, and a century later still, a whole 19th-century movement that included Lord Lytton, Eliphaz Levi, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. (A book called The Occult Establishment by James Webb tells the whole amazing story.)

Then in 1969, my US literary agent Scott Meredith wrote to ask me if I would be interested in writing a book about “the occult” for Random House. It was not a subject that interested me particularly, but I accepted it because I needed the money. But by then, a commission I had treated almost as a joke had begun to interest me. I had assumed, to begin with, that ghosts were a superstition. Then I discovered that they had been believed in by every civilisation for thousands of years, and began to feel that perhaps my dismissive attitude was a mistake. I began meeting people who had experienced various odd phenomena: one woman told me of her out-of-body experience while suffering from fever in hospital; my mother had seen some kind of an angel when she was apparently dying from a burst appendix, and had been told that she had to return because “her time had not yet come”. She lived another 36 years. The occult is a natural faculty ​that ​we all possess, but ​have deliberately got rid of because it would be a nuisanceIt 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!