ABRAXAS: Quotes from Colin Wilson
Contracting into a point
...[T]he symbol of my childhood was never the racing goggles of Lawrence or St. Exupery but the tub of Diogenes. To establish complete independence, like a youth called Huckleberry Hodge featured in The Rover or some other of my favourite boy's papers, who lived in a barrel and fished with a line tied to his big toe while he slept. When I think back on my childhood, and try to focus that impulse again, it seems to me that my life has been dominated by a desire to contract into a point
(Voyage to a Beginning: An Autobiography
)
Starry Night
Van
Gogh painted ‘The Starry Night’, which seems to be a pure affirmation of
life; but he committed suicide, and left behind a note that said, "Misery
will never end." According to Ayer [Freddy Ayer, the logical positivist
philosopher], this merely amounted to the expression of two different moods, and
it was as meaningless to ask which was "truer" as to ask whether a
rainy day is truer than a sunny day. My own feeling was that the question was
not only significant, but - literally - a matter of life and death.
(Essay
on the New Existentialism 1986)
The Idea of Freedom
When the German tanks rolled into Warsaw, or the Russians into Budapest, it seemed perfectly obvious what we meant by freedom; it was something solid and definite that was being stolen, as a burglar might steal silver. But when a civil servant retires after forty years, and finds himself curiously bored and miserable, the idea of freedom becomes blurred and indefinite; it seems to shimmer like a mirage.
(The Occult)
The Blinkered Will
There is a certain problem that nags me all the time, and has always done so. It is this: on the one hand there is the world, an immense and complex and beautiful place, with enough interests in it to occupy man for a million years. And on the other hand there is the curious narrowness, limitedness, of human consciousness. We are like blinkered horses; we are aware of almost nothing except the minute we are living in, the room we happen to be sitting in. Why? Why has natured blinkered the human will? Why do so many of us die, bored and discouraged, at the age of seventy, complaining that we have exhausted the world.
(Voyage to a Beginning)
The New Criminal
It may therefore be a sign of the evolution of our society that we are producing more types who fall into this penumbral area between the socially irresponsible and the criminal. And if such a person happens to have a dominant personality and strong sexual urges, it is not at all impossible that he will be closer to the criminal than the pseudo-artist. And it has to be accepted that the number of such people will increase steadily before the end of this century.
(A Casebook of Murder)
The Outsider
My vision of our civilisation was a vision of cheapness and futility, the degrading of all intellectual standards. In contrast to this, the Outsider seemed to be the man who, for any reason at all, felt himself lonely in the crowd of the second-rate. As I conceived him, he could be a maniac carrying a knife in a black bag…he could be a saint or visionary, caring for nothing but one moment in which he seemed to understand the world, and see into the heart and nature of God.
(Religion and the Rebel)