Reviews for New Mexican folklore of the Rio Abajo

The average rating for New Mexican folklore of the Rio Abajo based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-18 00:00:00 Cheryl Assaid This was Colin Wilson's second book (following his classic "The Outsider"), and also the second book in his Outsider cycle. In this book Wilson continues his analysis of the Outsider from his previous book, only now he looks to solve the problem of the Outsider, namely, how the Outsider can be saved. He essentially writes that what the human race needs is a new religion, though even he seems aware that this isn't a final answer, as he sums up at one point in the book: "Existentialism begins with the Outsider, and ends... no one knows where; but its road lies through religion. Religion is not the end; it is only a rest-house on the way." It would have been nice to see a chapter in this on William Blake (though to be fair, Wilson did analyze Blake's work to some extent in the book he wrote prior to this one), and the exclusion of J.K. Huysmans (the anti-modern religious mystic artist par excellence) is mystifying (though he did do an essay on Huysmans in a later book during the 1980's), but all-in-all this was a very enjoyable and thought-provoking book, with interesting observations on everyone from Rilke to Rimbaud to Kierkegaard to Oswald Spengler to Jacob Boehme to Blaise Pascal to Swedenborg to Bernard Shaw (to name just a few; though sadly, as was the case with "The Outsider," Wilson chooses to only focus on male Outsiders of history while almost completely ignoring female Outsiders). I especially liked the anti-abstract/continental philosophy stance he takes at various points in the text (along with his attack on conventional Pauline Christianity), and the autobiographical chapter at the very start of the book detailing how he came to write "The Outsider" makes for fascinating reading. And as always in Wilson's books, the text is remarkably quotable. Here are a few of the more memorable ones (in my opinion): "The Outsider is a symptom of civilization's decline; Outsiders appear like pimples on a dying civilization." "The concept of insanity only matters because it is a step towards supersanity." (this passage reminded me of Grant Morrison's famous description of the Joker in his graphic novel "Arkham Asylum." In that comic he even uses the same phrase of "super-sanity.") "The Outsider's final problem is to become a visionary." "Terror is the beginning of beauty." "The Outsider must raise the banner of a new existentialism." "Men should not hold the physical world in contempt (which is blasphemy), but they should not be enslaved by it either." "Man is simply a dirty filter through which the spirit has to penetrate." "The Outsider is the man who has faced chaos. The Insider is the man who blinds himself to it." "The true Christian is the man who has faced his own despair, and has defeated it by an act of faith." "The existentialist is the artist-philosopher, and his natural medium is the Bildungsroman." "The fullest enjoyment of life demands complete non-attachment." "The Outsider must find a direction and commit himself to it, not lie moping about the meaninglessness of the world." "Existentialism means the recognition that life is a tiny corner of casual order in a universe of chaos." "The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels."

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-21 00:00:00 Jeffrey Lamela I read this after reading The Outsider; I bought it in Reigate in a second-hand bookshop in 1968. He gives a lot more autobiographical detail in this book which was slated after all the hype with The Outsider! I even have a TLS review of the times, and I quote: "His formal education had been slight. Having read it [The Outsider] some people thought it mere rubbish. Others feared that overpraise might go to the young man's head. This fear he more than once seemed to justify by making public statements in which it was not impossible to detect. . megalomania." He or she goes onto say why RATR is even worse than The Outsider. The reviewer remained anonymous! Herbert Read praised Religion and the Rebel. I lapped up the summaries of figures such as, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Whitehead. For me reading it in my 20s, it was all exciting stuff. In sequence, I read The Age of Defeat, afterwards, The Strength to Dream, soon followed by his sf Mind Parasites and The Philosopher's Stone. Incidentally a appreciative study of his output is Colin Wilson: The Man & His Mind by Howard F Dossor publ in 1990. Colin Wilson died in hospital, age 82, on 5 Dec 2013.