Colin Wilson

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Colin Wilson (1984)

Colin Wilson ( Colin Henry Wilson; born June 26, 1931 in Leicester , † December 5, 2013 in St Austell ) was an English writer .

life and work

Born to a working-class family, Colin Wilson dropped out of school at 16 and started working in factories and offices. As a conscript in the army, he managed to obtain his discharge by simulating homosexuality . His childhood dream of being a scientist gave way to the need to become a writer in his youth. One of his guiding stars has been George Bernard Shaw since he heard the third act of Man and Superman on a BBC broadcast when he was 15 . Other early influences were Friedrich Nietzsche and the Bhagavad Gita .

Since late 1954 he worked on The Outsider. In this study, Wilson analyzed alienation and creativity by looking at the biographies of creative individuals who broke up in society (such as Vaslav Nijinsky , Vincent van Gogh, and TE Lawrence ) on the one hand, and the artistic portrayal of such outsiders in the on the other Works by Ernest Hemingway , Hermann Hesse , Fjodor Dostojewski and others.

The book was a great success immediately after its publication in 1956 and determined the image of Wilson in the media until the end. It was controversial at the time and helped popularize the philosophy of existentialism , particularly that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus , in Britain. Wilson was dubbed Angry Young Man at the time , although he had little in common with other representatives of this group, and after a short time received almost exclusively negative reviews by the literary establishment. In the following years Wilson developed his own form of existentialism, which focuses on the possibilities to escape the narrowness of everyday consciousness and to develop our potential.

These ideas brought him into contact with the American psychologist Abraham Maslow , who made the observation that people who reach the level of self-actualization in the hierarchy of needs he set up report more often than others of “peak experiences”. Colin Wilson wrote a book on Maslow's life and work in the context of contemporary psychology , which was published in 1972 under the title New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow & the Post-Freudian Revolution .

A year earlier he had achieved his greatest success with audiences and critics since his first work with The Occult: A History (Eng .: The Occult ). What was actually only supposed to be a commissioned work for a publisher, developed after Wilson's initially skeptical attitude changed while dealing with the subject, into a comprehensive and extensive book on occultism and the history of magic . The material he took up in this book was to be deepened by Wilson in many other works, e.g. B. in Mysteries (1978) and Beyond the Occult (1988). His biographies on Georges I. Gurdjieff (German: Gurdjieff - the fight against sleep ), Wilhelm Reich (The Quest for Wilhelm Reich), Carl Gustav Jung (German: Lord of the Underworld. CG Jung and the 20th century ), Rudolf Steiner (German: Rudolf Steiner. Herald of a new world and human image ), Aleister Crowley (Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast) and PD Ouspensky (The Strange Life of PD Ouspensky).

Another creative field of Wilson's formed since 1961, when he published an Encyclopedia of Murder with Patricia Pitman , the criminology . His main work in this area is A Criminal History of Mankind (1984).

Wilson has been writing fiction since the beginning of his writing career . On his first novel Ritual in the Dark (1960, dt .: The shaft of Babel ) on a Jack the Ripper ajar serial killer he worked before The Outsider . His science fiction novels The Mind Parasites (1967, German: Die Seelenfresser ) and The Space Vampires (1976, German: Vampires from space ) became famous in Germany . The former, like The Philosopher's Stone (1969), takes up the Cthulhu myth by HP Lovecraft , the latter was filmed as Lifeforce , although this adaptation was much to the displeasure of Wilson, who featured it in his autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose ( 2004) called "the worst film of all time".

In 1994 the band In the Nursery Wilson had some of his favorite poems recite for their album Anatomy of a Poet .

Colin Wilson had lived in Cornwall since 1957 with his second wife Joy (née Stewart) . The two had a daughter (Sally) and two sons (Damon and Rowan); another son (Roderick Gerard) came from a previous marriage to Betty Wilson (née Troop). In 2011, Wilson suffered a stroke . He died of complications from pneumonia , for which he was hospitalized in October 2013. On December 20, 2013, he was buried in the St Goran cemetery. A collection of his printed works and manuscripts is in the archives of the University of Nottingham .

Quote

“Magic […] is the science of the future. I believe the human mind has reached a point in evolution where it is about to develop new powers - powers that were once considered magical. In fact, it has always possessed greater powers than we are still able to recognize today: powers of telepathy, the precognition of dangers, the second face, the thaumaturgy (healing power); but these powers were part of our instinctive animal inheritance. In the last thousand years or so mankind has been busily engaged in developing a different kind of force - the intellectual one - the result is Western civilization. The unconscious forces are not stunted; but they went "underground". And now the circle has come full circle: the intellect has reached certain limits which it can no longer cross as long as it does not regain some of its lost powers. Anyone who has a little knowledge of the currents of modern philosophy will understand what I mean: the intellect has become narrow, rigid and logical; and he tries to replace the more extensive intuition with a microscopic obsession with detail. He has cut himself off from his source. "

- Colin Wilson : The Occult, p. 45 f.

Publications

literature

Chat transcript
Obituaries

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Outside, with time's whips and scorns: Peter Guttridge meets the unusual, prolific and provocative author . In: The Independent . 5th June 1993
  2. ↑ Colin Wilson: Ghosts & Poltergeists . In: The New York Review of Books . Volume 36, Number 10, June 15, 1989 (reply to a letter from Martin Gardner )
  3. ↑ Colin Stanley: Colin Wilson 1931-2013 ( Memento of the original from March 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Paupers' Press website . December 28, 2013  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pauper.stormloader.com
personal data
SURNAME Wilson, Colin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilson, Colin Henry (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Leicester
DATE OF DEATH 5th December 2013
Place of death St Austell