"Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things"
About this Quote
The “thick, lead wall” is doing heavy psychological work. Lead blocks radiation; it’s a bunker material. Wilson’s subtext is that modern consciousness is armored against significance, not because meaning is absent but because we’ve built defenses - habit, cynicism, fatigue, the daily grind of categories. Poets, in his telling, are less “creative” than porous: they notice the wall because they keep pressing their ear to it.
Then comes the key rhetorical move: the wall vanishes “for no reason we can understand.” That line refuses both superstition and simple rationalism. He’s not claiming a miracle with a moral lesson; he’s describing an episodic mental state - awe, absorption, a rush of coherence - that arrives unpredictably and therefore feels external. Calling it “the infinite interestingness of things” is a sly, modern-friendly rebrand of the sublime: not thunderbolts and angels, but the suddenly intolerable vividness of the mundane.
Context matters: Wilson, a mid-century British writer obsessed with consciousness and the “outsider,” is arguing for a human-centered spirituality. He’s less interested in proving God than in explaining why humans keep reinventing God-shaped experiences - because sometimes reality, briefly, stops feeling like paperwork and starts feeling like signal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Wilson, Colin. (2026, January 15). Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/religion-mysticism-and-magic-all-spring-from-the-173526/
Chicago Style
Wilson, Colin. "Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/religion-mysticism-and-magic-all-spring-from-the-173526/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/religion-mysticism-and-magic-all-spring-from-the-173526/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
