From an article by Brad Spurgeon in the New York Times, August 17, 2005
Any intellectual who divides opinion as much as Colin
Wilson has for almost 50 years must be onto something, even if it is only
whether humans should be pessimistic or optimistic.
Mr. Wilson, who turned 74 in June and whose autobiography,
"Dreaming to Some Purpose," recently appeared in paperback from
Arrow, describes in the first chapter how he made his own choice. The son of
working-class parents from Leicester - his
father was in the boot and shoe trade - he was forced to quit school and go to
work at 16, even though his ambition was to become "Einstein's
successor." After a stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a
laboratory assistant, but he was still in despair and decided to kill himself.
On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an
insight: there were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager
and the other a thinking man, his real self.
The idiot, he realized, would kill them both.
"In that moment," he wrote, "I glimpsed the
marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons."
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