Strange glory: The Philosopher's Stone by Colin Wilson (1969)

The Philosopher's Stone by Colin Wilson (1969)

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The Philosopher's Stone is a tour de force, far ahead of the other Wilson horror novels I have read. Its scope and ambition are daunting. The author does a better job here of using complication and contradiction to elide the subjective wish-fulfillment Secret Monarch fantasy that adds so many longuers to The Mind Parasites (1967). 

(Wilson's 1976 novel The Space Vampires is less ambitious than The Philosopher's Stone and The Mind Parasites, giving the reader a sci-fi adventure mixed with Bulldog Drummond hi-jinks, though the author's Faculty-X existential power-of-positive-thinking philosophy is acknowledged, as it is in each book Wilson published, starting with 1971's The Occult.)

Wilson's subject, a man rising above the mental level of the rest of humanity to become an ubermensch, can leave a sour taste in the reader's mouth when too baldly narrated. The first half of The Philosopher's Stone, in the form of youthful confessions of a UK autodidact named Howard Lester, is very skilfully done, exploring the intellectual curiosity and passion of an adolescent with fine concreteness.

Howard's intimations of longevity - if not immortality - are suggested early on via music and poetry. Wilson is at his best when explicating music.

Howard's musical curiosity is furthered when he is hired as an assistant by local gentleman scientist Sir Alastair Lyell. 

....After dinner, we usually moved into the music room to play gramophone records, or sometimes, to make music for ourselves. (He played the clarinet and oboe, as well as the piano; I was also a passable clarinettist.) His collection of records - mostly 78's - was enormous, and occupied a whole wall, stretching from floor to ceiling. Sir Compton Mackenzie, who once spent a weekend in the house when I was there, said that Lyell probably owned the largest record library in the country after The Gramophone. I should mention here one of Lyell's amusing idiosyncrasies; he seemed to enjoy very long works for their own sake. I think he simply enjoyed the intellectual discipline of concentrating for hours at a time. If a work was long, it automatically recommended itself to him. So we have spent whole evenings listening to the complete Contest Between Harmony and Invention of Vivaldi, the complete Well Tempered Clavier, whole operas of Wagner, the last five quartets of Beethoven, symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, the first fourteen Haydn symphonies... He even had a strange preference for a sprawling, meandering symphony by Furtwangler, simply because it ran on for two hours or so.

My own enthusiasm and interest was obviously important to him. If I became tired or indifferent, I could immediately sense his disappointment. When his wife once protested at the number of hours he kept me working or listening to music, he said: 'Nonsense. Man is naturally a creature of the mind. The idea that brain-work tires people is an old wives' tale. Man should no more get tired of using his brain - if he is using it properly - than a fish should get tired of water.'

Lyell was, of course, an eclectic. He loved to quote a sentence that Yeats attributes to Pater - when Pater was explaining the presence of volumes of political economy on his bookshelves: 'Everything that has occupied man for any length of time is worthy of our study.' He was passionately opposed to the idea of the specialist in any field - certainly in science or mathematics. When I first knew him, his chief reputation was as a micro-biologist. He was the first man to cultivate rickettsiae — intracellular parasites of microscopic size - apart from a living host. His essay on mastigophora - a unicellular animal - is a classic that has been reprinted in many anthologies of scientific literature, and his paper on yeast infections, although less deliberately 'literary', is also a classic of its kind. But he refused to be 'typed' as a scientist, and I once heard Sir Julian Huxley refer jokingly to Sneinton Hall as 'the laboratory of a mediaeval alchemist'. After 1952 he was fascinated - one might almost say obsessed - by the problem of the expansion of the universe and quasi-stellar radio sources, and his observatory was one of the best-equipped private observatories in the country, perhaps in Europe. (Its 80-inch reflecting telescope is now in my own observatory near Mentone.) In 1957, his interest moved decisively to the field of molecular biology and problems of genetics. He also experienced a revival of an early interest in number theory - this was a matter in which I exerted an influence -and in the question of how far electronic calculating machines could solve previously insoluble problems....

Lyell's death leaves Howard alone and facing an existential crisis. A few chance events, however, refocuses his curiosity on human longevity and the cultivation of "value experiences" [Maslovian peak experiences] as a way to thwart the effects of aging. Wilson, parenthetically, would have done better not to begin the novel with a preface that explored this question: it is hard for the fiction narrative to rescue the theme from his initial banalities. 

Howard's insights are enriched when he spends a season with Lyell's more earthy brother in Alexandria:

....all science has simply been man's attempt to get his nose off the gramophone record, to see things from a distance, to escape this perpetual tyranny of the present. He invented language and then writing to try to escape his worm's eye view of his own existence. Later still he invented art - painting, music, literature, to try to store the stuff of his living experience. It came to me with a shock that art is really an extension of science, not its opposite; science tries to store and correlate dead facts; art and literature try to store and correlate living facts.

It is on returning to the UK that Howard encounters Sir Henry Littleway.

....One day, driving back from Nottingham, I switched on the car radio, and heard a voice saying: 'Man's evolution has been the steady growth of his independence from the body and the physical world. His mind seems intent on defying the processes of time. In this respect, art and science have the same aim. A lover of Dickens feels as much at home in nineteenth-century London as in the London of his own day. A historian may know ancient Rome or Athens as well as Oxford or Cambridge. And a scientist might find the Pleistocene era more interesting than the twentieth century. The human mind objects to being confined in the present. Man's history is the history of a search for wider horizons. And now arises the fundamental question. What is the purpose of all this contemplation? Is it to make us aware of our own unimportance, of the fact that our life is so brief as to be practically meaningless? If so, then science defeats its own purpose. We'd better remain confined by the perpetual horizon of the present, as the fish is confined by its horizon of water. But is this true? Is the final end of human knowledge to teach man his own unimportance? Or are we right to trust that curiously optimistic impulse that drives us to transcend our imprisonment in times?' 

Howard and Littleway, after initial hesitations and discussion, begin collaborating on ways to control achievement of value experiences to expand human longevity.

They are aided in this with first-hand study of farm laborer Dick O'Sullivan.

....One lunch time during hay making he had taken a pint too many. The accident occurred immediately after lunch. His head was trapped between the moving belt and a metal guard, and one of the spikes penetrated the top of his skull. They had turned the machine off immediately, in time to save him from becoming completely jammed in it, but it looked as if it would be impossible to move him without killing him. Finally, with some difficulty, they sawed through the metal guard, and gently removed him. He was unconscious, of course, and his hair was soaked with a mixture of blood and cerebro-spinal fluid - the liquid that cushions the brain, and in which it might be said to float Rushed to hospital, he was unconscious for two days, and the doctors predicted that the brain injury would result in his death within a short period. In fact, he woke up perfectly cheerful, complaining only of a headache. There was a hole in the top of his skull and a two inch crack running down to his right ear. His family were allowed in to see him, but all were warned not to tell him the extent of the injury. To everyone's surprise, he seemed to know about it, even to the length of the crack. He then looked at his father and said: 'You think I'm going to die within a week, don't you?' His father had been told this by the doctor, but none of the others knew. It was not until afterwards, when they compared notes and talked with the nurse, that it struck them that there was something odd about it all. The nurse swore that she had not mentioned the crack in the skull, and no one had mentioned dying. Who had told him? His wife went to visit him that evening, and asked him. 'Nobody told me,' he said, 'they didn't need to. I just knew.' The next day, one of the other patients stopped by the room to talk to him. As he left, O'Sullivan remarked: 'Poor old boy.' 'Why?' the muse asked, 'he's going out this afternoon.' 'He'll be dead by tomorrow.' That night, the man died of a cerebral haemorrhage.

Examples of his 'second sight' multiplied. But it seemed to function erratically. He accurately foretold that the father of one of the nurses would break his leg, yet failed to foresee that his own mother would almost die of influenza. He told a brother that he would win a large sum of money on the football pools; in fact, the brother won a small sum at the greyhound track. At other times, he simply had a vague premonition that something was about to happen to somebody, but he had no idea of whom or what.

....An X-ray photograph showed that the brain had been penetrated by the spike, but the patient showed no sign of it. His memory seemed unimpaired, and his co-ordination remained excellent. But his temperament changed completely. He had been athletic and vital, given to displays of physical strength or skill, and to practical jokes. Now he became dreamy and lethargic. He had always been good tempered and generous; now he positively radiated benevolence and affection, so that several nurses burst into tears the day he left the hospital. He had been completely uninterested in any form of relaxation except sport; now he lost all interest in sport, but would sway about in a rapturous way if there was music on the radio.

This leads Howard to another level of insight:

....I saw with perfect clarity why the 'value experience' does not guarantee long life, or even immunity of illness. It is totally unimportant. It is like a flash of lightning. But what is important is not the lightning, but what you see by it. If lightning explodes in empty space, it illuminates nothing. If it explodes over a mountain landscape, it illuminates a great deal. In the same way, if I experience a sense of total affirmation after a good dinner, or on the point of sleep, it is merely a pleasant feeling, a kind of emotional orgasm that illuminates nothing but itself. If I experience it when I am wide awake and intensely excited, I glimpse whole vistas of reality. It is this reality that is important, not the light by which I see it.

What was lacking in Dick O'Sullivan - as well as in Delius and Scriabin and Ramakrishna - could be defined in one word: will. They accepted the value-experience as good in itself.

....This, I saw clearly, was the direction of man's evolution - from the animal towards the god. And the sign of that evolution is deeper knowledge, broader consciousness, a god-like grasp of distant horizons. The value experience is all very pleasant, but it is not a uniquely human experience. Every animal can experience ecstasy. That is not the point. But think of the difference between the ecstasy of a baby and the ecstasy of a great scientist or philosopher. The ecstasy of the scientist illuminates mountain ranges of knowledge acquired over a lifetime.

Howard and Littleway begin experiments on felon and alcoholic Zachariah Longstreet. They place a sliver of Neumann's alloy in Longstreet's frontal lobe. In this way, they discover how to focus the will to create value experiences. After experiments on another subject, Howard and Littleway have the slivers of alloy implanted in their own brains.

....But what of the problem that was the beginning of these researches - the process of ageing? How can I know at this point that the problem has been solved?

I can only state that it is so. Shaw once remarked that people die of laziness and want of conviction and failure to make their lives worth living. With his poet's intuition, he came closer to solving the problem than any of the scientific gerontologists, all working upon the false assumption that life is chemical in nature. Men die for the same reason they fall asleep - because the senses close up from boredom when there is nothing to occupy them. But a man who is deeply interested in something can stay awake all night.

Howard is surprised to discover he is able to read the world backward in a kind of mental time travel.

....My eye fell on a shallow ditch at the bottom of the lawn, which ran in a curve around the house.

Suddenly, it came to me with complete certainty, as if someone had spoken in my ear, that this was the remains of a moat. I tried to imagine what this garden had looked like when it had a moat - idly, as one does. The result was surprising; it was as if the ditch had filled with water. I do not mean that I could see it full of water. This was not an hallucination. I was imagining it; but imagining as if in a dream, so that the imagination was a kind of inward seeing. Moreover, with the same vividness, I could see a bridge across the stream, somewhere in the direction of the garden gate, and bare ground between the trees on the other side instead of grass, although there were some bluebells.

I hardly dared to breathe, afraid this intensity would go away. I looked at the house, and tried to imagine it as it had been four centuries ago, using intelligent speculation, and my knowledge of the period. The beams would probably not be painted; they would be tarred. The roof might be thatched, but more probably, would have wooden slates instead of dull-red tiles. Again, the impression was vivid, as if I had quite suddenly dozed off to sleep and dreamed of the house.

Then I understood, and it was so obvious that I laughed aloud. Human beings are completely mistaken about the function of the senses. To put it very crudely, and to over-simplify to the point of falsification: the senses are not intended to let things in, but to keep things out. We are superior to the animals because our senses let in less than theirs do....

This leads Howard by a series of intermediate steps in historical research via time travel to conclude - in the true spirit of crankdom - that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's plays! This, I'm afraid, seems like Wilson's own off-the-beam auto-didacticism interrupting an exciting point in the novel. Howard and Littleway's investigation of a haunted house (or poltergeist) seems like another.

....Most people live on a level of emotional triviality which means that when they read Shakespeare, they experience the pleasure of hearing their own feelings echoed. And since the language is impressive, and requires a certain intellectual effort to follow, they can have no doubt that this is really Great Literature. This combination - of fine language with totally trivial content - has kept Shakespeare's stock high for three hundred years, and will continue to do so until the movement of evolution consigns him to the dustbin of quaint but meaningless antiquities.

Wilson soon turns this miring of the narrative around, and the second half of The Philosopher's Stone becomes a whirlwind Lovecrafting adventure.

....But the thing that puzzled me most about my Stonehenge experience was this: that there was an odd sense of evil, of menace. This was something I had almost come to discount since my 'operation'. The only time I had experienced impressions so wholly unpleasant was when Lyell and I had looked down into the horrible well of Chichen Itza, with its slimy green surface, and thought of the children thrown into it as a sacrifice to the god.

Why should looking back over long periods of time produce a feeling of terror? Admittedly, there is the sense of one's own unimportance; but all science produces this, to some extent. Besides, thinking closely about this, it came to me that my problem was still one of immaturity. I had not yet learnt to stop seeing myself as Harry Lester, aged thirty-six, one of fortune's favoured children. Once I managed to lose this personal equivalent of provincialism, time would cease to negate me. But why the feeling of menace?

More extended excerpts from the second half of the novel can be found here.

Howard's time-travelling into the lost civilizations of prehistory allows Wilson to put Lovecraft, Velikovsky, and Hörbiger through the aesthetic duck press. Wilson's heroes use their time-vision to explore Silbury Hill and the secrets of the Aztecs. All of which, by stages, lead Howard and Leadway to the realization that Lovecraft's sleeping alien monsters are trying to thwart their exploration of the past, and are ready to wage war in the present-day, using human puppets to do so.

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The Philosopher's Stone begins as a marvellous bildungsroman, then takes its protagonist forward to about age forty. Who knows how many centuries of life Howard Lester has ahead of him? It is a sublime prospect, though Wilson has little use for aesthetic sublimity.

....In any case, whatever the cause, there could surely be no doubt that the romantics and visionaries were presages of the future, heralds blowing trumpets to announce a new stage in human evolution - a new power in human beings - this power of detachment, of the 'god's eye view' instead of the 'worm's eye view'. At this point, I emptied my glass and went to the counter for another. And as the girl pulled it, I found myself wondering if my great 'insight' was not merely the result of good beer.

Jay

14 March 2020