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The Philosopher’s Stone

Colin Wilson

PANTHER,

GRANADA PUBLISHING

London Toronto Sydney New York

Published by Granada Publishing Limited in Panther Books 1974 Reprinted 1978

ISBN 0 586 03943 0

Granada Publishing Limited

Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, AL2 2NF

and

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Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks

Set in Linotype Pilgrim

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including

this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Scanned : Mr Blue Sky

Proofed : It’s Not Raining

Date : 09 February 2002

PREFATORY NOTE

Bernard Shaw concluded his preface to Back to Methuselah with the hope that ‘a hundred apter and

more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine... far behind’. Perhaps the thought of trying

to leave Shaw far behind has scared off would-be competitors. Or perhaps - what is altogether more

probable - the younger hands are simply not interested in writing parables of longevity, or any other kind

of parable. Most of my contemporaries seem to feel pretty strongly that the activities of thinking and

novel-writing are incompatible, and that to be interested in ideas reveals a deficiency in the creative

faculties. And since the critics also like to foster this idea - perhaps out of a kind of defensive

trade-unionism - it seems to have achieved the status of a law of contemporary literature.

Now no one has a profounder respect for the critics than I, or strives more constantly to sound like a

paid-up member of the literary establishment. But I enjoy ideas. And this seems to give me a rather odd

perspective on modern literature. I suspect that H. G. Wells is probably the greatest novelist of the

twentieth century, and that his most interesting novels - if not necessarily the best - are the later ones. I

am completely unable to be objective about Shaw; he seems to me simply to be the greatest European

writer since Dante. And I completely lack sympathy for the emotional and personal problems that seem

to be the necessary subject of a contemporary play or novel. Mr Osborne once said his aim was to make

people feel. I think they feel too much. I’d like to make them stop feeling and start thinking.

Fortunately for me, I am neither original nor creative, so I can afford to ignore the contemporary rules.

And there is another factor in my favour. Since Shaw wrote Back to Methuselah , science fiction has

become an established genre, and it has even become quite respectable. And in recent years, I have

stumbled accidentally into the writing of a few modest works of science fiction.

I must explain how this came about. In 1961, I wrote a book called The Strength to Dream, a study of

the creative imagination, particularly in writers of fantasy and horror stories. A large part of the book was

inevitably devoted to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, the recluse of Providence, Rhode Island, Who died of

malnutrition and a cancer of the intestine in 1937. I pointed out that although Lovecraft possesses a

gloomy imaginative power that compares with Poe, he is basically an atrocious writer - most of his work

was written for Weird Tales , a pulp magazine - and his work is finally interesting as case history rather

than as literature.

In due course, a copy of my book fell into the hands of Lovecraft’s old friend - and publisher - August

Derleth. And Derleth wrote to me, protesting that my judgement on Lovecraft was too harsh, and asking

me why, if I was all that good, I didn’t try writing a ‘Lovecraft’ novel myself. And the answer to this

question is that I never write purely for the fun of it. I write as a mathematician uses a sheet of paper for

doing calculations: because I think better that way. And Lovecraft’s novels are not about ideas, but about

an emotion - an emotion of violent and total rejection of our civilisation, which I, being rather cheerful by

temperament, do not happen to share.

But a couple of years later, an analogy thrown out in my Introduction to the New Existentialism

became the seed of a science fiction parable about ‘original sin’ - man’s strange inability to get the best

out of his consciousness. I cast it in the Lovecraft tradition, and it became The Mind Parasites , which

was published in due course by August Derleth. Its reception by English critics was unexpectedly good; I

suspect this is because I didn’t sound as if I was serious.

And so when, two years ago, I became interested in questions of brain physiology - as a by-product of a

novel about sensory deprivation - it seemed natural to develop some of these ideas in another ‘Lovecraft’

novel. Besides, ever since, reading Wells’s Time Machine at the age of eleven, it has always been a

daydream of mine to write the definitive novel about time travel. Time travel is a perpetually alluring idea,

but it always sounds so preposterous. Even when my friend Van Vogt - the contemporary SF writer I

enjoy most - uses it, he makes it sound a joke. The question of how to make it sound plausible is quite a

challenge.

It sounds a vertiginous mixture - Shaw, Lovecraft and Wells - but it’s the kind of thing I enjoy doing. In

fact, I got quite carried away until this novel became twice as long as originally intended. Even so, I had

to write part of it as a separate short novel, which August Derleth has published.

A final word. It is part of the game in a Lovecraft novel to stick as far as possible to actual sources, and

never to invent a fact when you can dig one out of some obscure work of scholarship. I would modestly

claim to have surpassed Lovecraft in this particular department. Nearly all the ‘sources’ quoted are

genuine, the major exception being the Vatican Codex; even so, there is a fair amount of archaeological

authority for the hypothetical contents of this codex. The Voynich manuscript does, of course, exist, and

is still untranslated.

Seattle-Cornwall November 1968

PART ONE

THE QUEST OF THE ABSOLUTE

I was reading a book on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams the other day, while listening to a

gramophone record of his remarkable Fifth Symphony, when I came across the following remark: ‘I have

struggled all my life to conquer amateurish technique, and now that perhaps I have mastered it, it seems

too late to make any use of it.’ I found myself moved almost to tears by the poignancy of those words of

a great musician. Admittedly, he was eighty-six when he died, but for practical purposes - the value of

the music he wrote in his last years - it might well have been twenty years earlier. And I found myself

thinking: Supposing by some fluke, Vaughan Williams had lived another twenty-five years... or supposing

he had been born a quarter of a century later. Could I have passed on to him what I now know, so that

he might still be alive and writing great music? The case of Shaw is even more to the point, for he came

close to the great discovery in Back to Methusakh , and in his early nineties, he remarked jokingly that he

was a proof of his own theory that men could live to be three hundred. Yet this is the man who said two

years later, as he lay in a hospital bed with a broken leg: ‘I want to die, and I can’t, I can’t,’ He came so

close, but he was alone; and a man standing alone lacks that final ounce of conviction. Would Columbus

have had the courage to reach San Salvador Island if he had been alone on the Santa Maria ?

It was this train of thought that decided me to tell the story of my discovery exactly as it happened. In

doing so, I break my own vow of secrecy; but I shall see that the account is withheld from those whom it

might harm - that is to say, from most of the human race. It should exist, even if it never leaves a bank

vault. The carbon copy of memory grows thinner year by year.

I was born in the Nottinghamshire village of Hucknall Torkard in 1942. My father was a maintenance

engineer in the colliery of Birkin Brothers. Those who have read D. H. Lawrence will recognise the

name; in fact, Lawrence was born fairly close by, at Eastwood. Byron is buried in the family vault at

Hucknall, and in my day, Newstead Abbey - his home - was still approached through a typical coal

mining village of grimy cottages. The setting sounds romantic; but dirt and boredom are not romantic; and

most of the memories of the first ten years of my life are of dirt and boredom. I think of falling rain, and

the smell of fish and chips on autumn nights, and queues outside the local cinema on Saturday evenings. I

was back there a few weeks ago, and found the place unrecognisable. It is now a suburb of Nottingham,

with an airport, an underground railway for commuters, and helicopter stations on the top of most blocks

of flats. Yet I cannot say I regret the change; I only have to read a few pages of The Rainbow to

remember how much I hated the place.

The great conflict of my childhood was between my love of science and my love of music. I was always a

good mathematician. My father gave me my first slide rule for Christmas when I was six. And, like most

mathematicians, I was almost dangerously susceptible to music. I can remember pausing outside the

church one evening, ‘clutching an armful of library books, and listening to the sound of the choir. They

were obviously rehearsing - probably some abomination by Wesley or Stainer - for they repeated the

same passage of half a dozen notes over and over again. The effect was almost incantatory, and in the

cold night air the voices sounded distant and mysterious, as if mourning for man’s loneliness. Suddenly I

found myself crying, and before I could stop it, the feeling rushed over me like a burst dam. I hurried into

the churchyard and flung myself on the grass, where I could stifle my sobs, and allowed the feeling to

convulse me until I felt as though I were being shaken by the shoulders. It was a disturbing experience.

When I walked home - feeling relaxed and light-headed - I found it impossible to understand what had

happened to me.

Colin Wilson - The Philospher's Stone.pdf

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