"Colin Wilson - The Criminal History of Mankind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

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INTRODUCTION
I was about twelve years old when I came upon a bundle of magazines tied with string in a second-hand
bookshop - the original edition of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, published in 1920. Since some of the
parts were missing, I got the whole pile for a few shillings. It was, I must admit, the pictures that attracted
me - splendid full-page colour illustrations of plesiosaurs on a Mesozoic beach; Neanderthal men snarling
in the entrance to their cave; the giant rock-hewn statues of Rameses II and his consort at Abu Simbel. Far
more than Wells’s text, these brought a breathless sensation of the total sweep of world history. Even
today I feel a flash of the old magical excitement as I look at them - that peculiar delight that children feel
when someone says, ‘Once upon a time ...’

In 1946, Penguin Books republished ten volumes of Wells to celebrate his eightieth birthday, including
the condensed version of the Outline, A Short History of the World. It was in this edition that I discovered
that strange little postscript entitled ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’. I found it so frustrating and
incomprehensible that I wanted to tear my hair: ‘Since [1940] a tremendous series of events has forced
upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that
Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out.’ And this had not
been written at the beginning of the Second World War - which might have been understandable - but
after Hitler’s defeat. When I came across the earlier edition of the Short History I found that, like the
Outline, it ends on a note of uplift: ‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this