In the summer of 1983 I found myself travelling to Cornwall, in the far west of England. For the past several years I had been reading the work of a writer whose ideas interested me deeply and I was on my way to meet him. His name was Colin Wilson.

Existentialism, consciousness, and the occult seem strange bedfellows. Find out how they get along this summer.

In his debut book, The Outsider, the twenty-four year old British existentialist Colin Wilson made his first attempt at analysing a...