Word: wilson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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President Logan Wilson of the University of Texas warned that "too much leeway is given youngsters in evading such fundamentals as mathematics, foreign languages and science. Extracurricular demands on student time-clubs, student newspapers, marching bands and drum majorettes-have become excessive...
With this volume, Wilson's game of intellectual hooky is certainly up. The book is a sequence of unblinking non sequiturs, half-fashioned logic and firm disregard for the English language. The merit of The Outsider was that it brought fresh insight to such diverse figures as Shaw and Hemingway, Van Gogh and T. S. Eliot, by casting them in the role of questing near-metaphysicians at the bedside of modern man. The tragic dilemma, as Wilson developed it, was that the Outsider had outdistanced the comforting illusions of everyday society while falling short of the luminous serenity...
...promise of The Outsider's sequel was that it would explore "my ideas about a new religion." The promise has not been kept. Instead, Wilson offers another hodgepodge of Outsiders-Rilke, Rimbaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jacob Boehme, Pascal...
Swedenborg, Kierkegaard, Toynbee, et al. When he does not have his avant-garde up, Wilson sounds suspiciously like Norman Vincent Peale: "It is not original sin that keeps man unaware of his own godhood, but his failure to connect himself with his own powerhouse...
...only powerhouse with which Colin Wilson has been visibly connected is the reading room of the British Museum. The obsessive idea he picked up there belonged to a previous chair-warmer at the same establishment, Bernard Shaw. It is that the Life Force makes everything make sense. Presumably this is the sense, if any, of Wilson's conclusion: "If life did not pervade space and time, the universe of matter would be tohubohu, complete chaos." As for the present state of Colin Wilson's mind and thought-tohu-bohu...