The Essential Colin Wilson (40 page)

The next problem is more important than all this speculation: How is it possible to get rid of them? It is no answer simply to publish 'the facts'. The historical facts mean nothing at all; they would be ignored. In some way, the human race has to be made aware of its danger. If I did what would be so easy -arranged to be interviewed on television, or wrote a series of newspaper articles on the subject—I might be listened to, but I think it more probable that people would simply dismiss me as insane. Yes, indeed, this is a tremendous problem. For short of persuading everyone to try a dose of mescalin, I can think of no way of convincing people. And then, there is no guarantee that mescalin would bring about the desired result—otherwise, I might risk dumping a large quantity of it in some city's water supply. No, such an idea is unthinkable. With the mind vampires massed for attack, sanity is too fragile a thing to risk. I now understand why my experiment at Trans-world ended so disastrously. The vampires
deliberately destroyed
those people, as a kind of warning to me. The average person lacks the mental discipline to resist them. This is why the suicide rate is so high . . .

I
must
learn more about these creatures. While my ignorance is so complete, they could destroy me. When I know something about them, perhaps I shall also know how to make the human race aware of them.

From
The Black Room
, 1971

The Black Room
is a spy novel, about the attempt of a group of scientists to find a method of preventing brain-washing through sensory deprivation. In this extract, the hero, Kit Butler, has just emerged from his own experience of the black room.

Butler said: 'What time is it?'

'A quarter past six on Saturday morning.'

'Saturday! I must have slept for about forty-eight hours!'

Gradwohl was tall and bony, about sixty years old. He wore a light grey suit that hung limply on him, giving the impression that it had been made for a much broader man. The height of the domed forehead was emphasized by the almost complete baldness of his head. He reminded Butler of his former house master. He said: 'Come and have some coffee. Let me say first that it is a great privilege to meet you.' His handshake was jerky, like a man tugging impatiently at a bellrope.

Butler followed him out, and down the ladder. The gunmetal door was wide open, and the smell of the morning was intoxicating. Gradwohl asked: 'How much longer do you think you could have stayed in?'

'I'm not sure. Quite a while, I think.'

'I think so too.'

'Why did you fetch me out?'

The sunlight dazzled him, so that he stumbled on a rut in the mud. Gradwohl took his elbow.

'I myself arrived only two hours ago. I drove straight up from Edinburgh. And since I was not tired, I went into Colonel Sampson's office and checked on the black rooms. I heard everything you said about false fatigue. Very important. I had come to similar conclusions myself. You are also right when you say that you all need more discipline before you can stand the black room for a long period.'

They walked around the side of the building—the back door was locked—and in through the main entrance. The smells of the morning seemed unnaturally sharp and sweet. When his eyes adjusted to the sunlight, it seemed as cold and fresh as a waterfall of snow. In comparison, the main lounge, with its dead fire and smell of stale tobacco, seemed strange and lifeless. On the table, an electric coffee percolator was bubbling; when he came close to it, the smell of coffee seemed to assault his senses, flooding his mind with memories of Paris and Berlin. He went to the window, opened it, and looked down at the loch.

'Black or white?'

'White, please.'

Gradwohl's movements amused him. They were all sudden and sharp, like those of a puppet. When he poured the coffee, he kept his heels pressed tightly together, as if afraid they might run off in opposite directions. His speech, like his movements, was jerky and spasmodic, and this effect was increased by the strong German accent, that pronounced all d's as t's.

He handed Butler his coffee in a large cup, and the basin of lump sugar. Butler said: 'I'm told that you managed to stick the black room for twelve days. How did you manage that?'

Gradwohl sat down, stirring his coffee.

'That is not easy to explain. Partly by various disciplines—working out problems and so on. Partly because I have a naturally healthy subconscious mind . . . do you understand?'

'I think so.'

'And you know how I got it? By climbing mountains.'

'But how?'

'I can't explain how. But I can tell you about it. You know that in the thirties, Hitler's followers used to set out to climb impossible mountains?'

'No, I didn't. You mean as propaganda?'

'Quite. They developed a cult of physical courage that was sometimes stupid. They would deliberately choose almost impossible routes up mountains, and then climb them with the help of
pitons—
steel spikes that can be hammered into the rock—and
karabiners,
which are steel snaplinks that fit on the spikes. The major school of these Nazi daredevils lived in Munich, where my brother and I were also living. And so we began deliberately challenging them, just to prove that you didn't have to be a Nazi to climb a vertical rock face. We were both, of course, violently anti-Nazi, although we are not Jewish.' Gradwohl's accent made his words difficult to follow; it sounded almost as if he were speaking German. By concentrating hard, Butler was able to follow what was being said.

'Well, one day we heard that some of this Munich School had succeeded in climbing the north face of the Matterhorn, which rises like a wall for several thousands of feet. So Otto and I decided to go a step further, and attempt the Eigerwand—the north face of the Eiger, which is a six thousand foot wall, which had never been climbed, although several climbers had died in the attempt. Wulffian Gartner, the most daring climber in the Munich school, heard about our preparations and decided that he would do it first. So when we set up our camp in the meadows at the foot of the wall, we heard that four men had set out two days ago, and had climbed up to the third ice field. But before we had time to set out, the weather changed into ice and sleet. After another day, they decided to turn back—one of them had been injured by falling ice. On the fourth day, a thick cloud came down over the mountain, and a rescue party set out to try and reach them. We decided to join it—for although we disagreed with them politically, we didn't want to see them destroyed. We all went by train to the Eigerwand Station, then started to move across the ice by means of
pitons
. By the time we came close to them, only one of the four was still alive—Wulffian Gartner. But it was too dark to get to him. We had to return, and leave him there all night. We expected him to die, but when we reached him again the next morning he was still alive. But he was up above us, and his rope was too short to reach us. There was a great projecting rock between us, so we could get no higher. We told him to climb up to the body of one of his companions, and let it fall; then unravel the rope from the body into strands and lower it to us, so we could send him up another tope. It took him five hours and we thought he would never make it. But he did, and finally climbed down to within ten feet of us. Then the knot joining two ropes jammed in the
karabiner,
and he hung there, trying to free it with his teeth. There was nothing we could do—just stand there and watch him. Then suddenly, he looked down into my face. He said: 'Thanks for trying, anyway. I'm finished.' And I watched him die—quite suddenly, as if be had been shot.' Butler tried to disguise the shiver that passed over him. Gradwohl said: 'I watched him
decide
to die.'

'I suppose his strength was at an end.'

'What you call his strength had been at an end since the previous day. But he did not die, because he had decided there was still hope. And if he had reached our party, he would have found still more strength to make his way back to the station. No. It is what you were saying in the black room. Your will-power sustains your body from a subconscious reservoir. But if you get very exhausted, only a tremendous sense of purpose can sustain you. He had been making tremendous efforts for days, and now he suddenly decided it wasn't worth it any more.' Gradwohl sipped slowly at his coffee. 'That taught me the first lesson: that man is as strong as his sense of purpose—no more and no less. We don't notice this normally because we never see people pushing themselves to their limits.'

Butler helped himself to more coffee, and poured in cold milk. 'And did you climb the Eigerwand?'

'We did, but not that year—1935. We decided to wait for the next year, and make the attempt just before the Olympic Games.' He paused, staring into the fireplace with its charred logs. 'We were lucky. If the weather had changed, we would have died too. And it was there that I learned the second lesson.' Butler waited for him to go on. Gradwohl seemed in no hurry. He said finally:

'We set out by night, because during the day, the sunlight causes the ice to melt, and rocks and chunks of ice keep falling down. We climbed this with
pitons
and
karabiners
, and reached the top at about eleven in the morning. Before evening, we had reached the foot of the second ice field, where we camped for the night. The mist had come down, and we were afraid that the weather would get worse. Before dawn the next day we started on again. Here we had to leave behind some of our rope and two
pitons
and steel links—we had to hammer
pitons
into a vertical wall of ice, and then swing across it on ropes to reach a ledge. It took us all day to reach the third ice field, and we decided to try to cross this before we camped for the night. This was a mistake, because we were very tired, and there is only one way off the ice field, up a kind of ramp. When we were halfway up, the wind began to rise, and I knew that we had been foolish. We couldn't go back now. We could only go on. But if the darkness came before we found a ledge, it was the end of us—because although we were used to climbing in the dark, this was a vertical wall of ice, like the side of a sky-scraper. Then, just as we were at the end of our strength, Otto saw a ledge about twenty feet to the right—which was the opposite direction from the one we wanted to go. It took us an hour to reach it, and at one point, Otto slipped and I had to haul him back up—luckily, the rope was fixed to a
piton
. The ledge was three feet wide, and had a steep slope. It was also covered with ice to a depth of six inches. It was just large enough for the two of us. We hammered
pitons
into the ice, and tied ourselves to them. We could not sleep, of course—it was too cold, and we might accidentally tear out
the pitons
. So we sat there, looking into the clouds, and praying that there would be no storm. And then, suddenly, the clouds all drifted away, and we could look down at the lights of Grindelwald, thousands of feet below. And suddenly, Otto laughed, and said: "Why are we doing this, Franz? Are we both mad?" I said: "No, we are not mad." And I began to think about it. Why did I suddenly feel so happy, hanging there like a fly and looking at the lights? I was thinking: Thousands of comfortable people are lying down there in their beds, and they are not particularly happy, because they take their beds for granted. They are all suffering from what you call false fatigue—a mistaken feeling that life is not really worth living. And then I thought: But now I
know
, beyond all shadow of doubt, that life is worth living. Tomorrow, I shall be climbing up the most dangerous part of the mountain, the White Spider, and for every foot of the way, I shall be concentrating, determined not to slip, determined to reach the exit cracks. And then the absurdity of it struck me. I said to Otto: "We have climbed this mountain to remind ourselves of something we ought to know anyway—that life is only worth living when the will is concentrated." You see what I mean? Why do I need to set myself a difficult obstacle to concentrate my will? For two million years man has been climbing a mountain of evolution, and his will is so weak that he dies when he is less than a century old. That is all very well for most people, because they are so stupid. But you and I ought to know better, because our business
is
evolution. You are a composer, I am a philosopher. We can look back on the civilizations of the past and see how far we have climbed up the mountain. We shouldn't be drifting like the rest of the fools.'

From
The World of Violence
, 1963

The World of Violence is
a study in the contrast between the 'ivory tower' of an intellectual—in this case a mathematical prodigy—and the chaotic violence of actuality. The narrator is shaken out of his ivory tower when he sees a youth being beaten up by young hooligans. His sense of helplessness leads him to buy a gun, and to join the pistol club, merely to convince himself that intellectuals can also be men of action. The ivory tower theme is first sounded early in the book, in the narrator's story about his uncle Sam.

I must mention now a circumstance that perhaps sounds absurd—or almost meaningless—but which has been of central importance to me since I was very small. It is this: I have never liked human beings. I do not mean that I felt a Swiftian hatred for them. This was something different; an obscure discomfort, as if mixing with people was like sitting in a dentist's chair having one's teeth drilled. As a small child, and well into my early twenties, I could not even go into a shop to buy a pencil without overcoming a certain revulsion. This was not shyness or a sense of inferiority, but a feeling that human relations are somehow absurd. I have never been able to watch two people talking about the weather without a deep feeling of wonderment; I watch them closely, expecting to see their faces crumble suddenly into horrible grief.

I suppose this is partly because human relations offend my sense of economy. I learned to think mathematically at the age of six; when I had a spare moment, I worked at some problem, such as Fermat's question of a formula that will generate prime numbers. I therefore feel astonished at the amount of thought-energy that most human beings seem to waste as a matter of course. It is rather as if someone should say to a long-distance hiker: 'Well, I'm going to take my morning walk now', and then proceed to walk around in a three-foot circle, explaining that when he has done this five thousand times he has walked the equivalent of five miles.