Life & Wisdom Quote by Colin Wilson

Wilson’s line has the clean snap of a mid-century provocation: mystical yearning reframed not as transcendence but as appetite, and then split along a stark gender binary. The intent is less to describe “mysticism” than to domesticate it, to drag the metaphysical down into psychology and power. “Possess the universe” makes the male impulse sound imperial and expansive, a cosmic version of mastery. “Desire to be possessed” turns the female impulse inward and relational, casting surrender as destiny. It’s a tidy contrast, which is exactly why it lands: it converts something slippery (spiritual experience) into something narratively legible (dominance and submission).

The subtext is where the trouble lives. Wilson writes as a masculine existentialist for whom intensity is a kind of achievement, and achievement carries the scent of conquest. His women are not granted the same existential project; they’re positioned as the project. That framing borrows from older psychoanalytic and literary habits that treat female interiority as receptive, porous, defined by being wanted. Even “somehow” functions like a rhetorical shrug, a preemptive alibi: don’t ask for evidence, accept the vibe.

Context matters. Wilson came up in postwar Britain, adjacent to the “angry young men” moment, when intellectual masculinity often performed itself through brash generalization about sex and spirit. Read now, the quote feels less like insight than like a cultural fossil: revealing not timeless truths about mysticism, but the era’s need to gender power so thoroughly that even the divine becomes a property dispute.