The Outsider
We are obviously big lovers of music but sometimes there is no substitute for losing yourself in the pages of a great book. This man, Mr Colin Wilson has been keeping us in good company this evening…
The Outsider created quite a stir when published in 1956. Written at the age of 24, Wilson offers up ideas on human alienation and the idea of the ‘Outsider’. A purposefully disjointed read, he plunders the works of a number of seminal authors including Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Hesse and Wells and references their characters to illustrate his ideas.
Written in the Reading Room at the British Museum and during a time when Wilson was often forced to sleep rough on Hampstead Heath, he was promptly herded up with the likes of Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis, a new generation of writers daubed ‘Angry Young Men’.
For a truly unique voice speaking across sociology, psychology, spirituality and being lost in modern society, we have a lot to learn from Wilson’s The Outsider. Some wonderfully left field ideas lie in it’s pages… he suggests creating your own religion and reinventing your spirituality to fend off the malaise and discontent in existence. We are working on it!
Now going to go and put on something really really noisy and precocious. Yeh!
