writing and writers

The Truth About the World by Nathan Jones

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
— Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023)

What a novel. Unlike anything I have ever read.

What can we learn from Colin Wilson, 24-year-old author of "The Outsider", which popularized existentialism in Britain? by Nathan Jones

The Outsider is not sure who he is.

He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”. His main business is to find his way back to himself.

  1. Wilson never doubted his abilities as a writer.

  2. He kept a journal: from its pages sprung the outline of “The Outsider,” his first book, which was a critical and commercial success.

  3. As a teenager, he worked in a coffee shop at night so that he could write in the British Museum during the day, that is, he oriented his life around his passion, not the other way around. And he kept his financial needs to the bare minimum in order to be able to devote as much time as possible to writing, rather than working.

  4. He was incredibly well read and had, at a very young age, the self-confidence to speak authoritatively and critically on the works of well-established authors (like Camus, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.)