Au hasard d'une rencontre avec des amis londoniens, Christopher Butler, musicien et compositeur, accepte une étrange proposition : se rendre en Écosse pour participer à un projet ultrasecret. Des scientifiques y expérimentent une installation appelée " Chambre noire ", où des sujets volontaires sont plongés dans une obscurité complète et un silence absolu. Il s'agit de savoir combien de temps ils pourront supporter psychologiquement ces conditions d'isolement extrême. Très vite, Butler comprend que ce projet intéresse divers services de renseignement, dont la CIA – nous sommes en pleine guerre froide –, ainsi qu'une mystérieuse organisation, la Station K. Afin d'en savoir plus sur celle-ci, il gagne la Tchécoslovaquie. L'aventure ne fait que commencer - ainsi que les dangers, notamment celui d'être pris pour un espion à la solde de la CIA par la police secrète tchèque –, et il ira de découverte en découverte, jusqu'à la révélation finale dans un mystérieux monastère. Un roman d'espionnage qui transcende le genre, riche en péripéties, où Colin Wilson poursuit sa recherche de la signification de la vie.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized. Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.
