I ‘ve discovered a draft post, below. It ‘s dated April 2nd, 2025. Looking up my handwritten journal of that date, I find this page:
I’ve been fascinated by the disparity between two books I’ve been reading: Colin Wilson’s Outsider and Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich. She’s best known to the world for a single quotation:
All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
less often for the continuation, in which “He” is God
He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome’.
Wilson has a different concept of how we shall not be overcome. The Outsider has 9 chapters, of which the 5th is “The Pain Threshold”. If I could summarise it in one sentence, it would be something like this:
When you hit bottom, the only way is up
which evokes in my mind a set of French authors, including Baudelair, Camus and Sartre. At university my subjects were French and Italian literature. In Dante’s Inferno, there was no up, as far as I can recall; but it would have been tedious to keep reading down to the very lowest rungs of Hell.
* transcription of page above:
