When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world

In the words of Colin Wilson, seeker of truth and philosopher of the margins, we find a confession that rings with the voice of countless dreamers: “When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.” This utterance carries within it not only the memory of youth but the eternal cry of the soul that longs for more than the ordinary. It is the voice of one who fled the grayness of the everyday into the golden lands of imagination, carried not by ships or horses, but by the written word.

The ancients too were escapists, though they gave it nobler names. They called it philosophy, poetry, myth. When the harshness of life pressed upon them, they turned to Homer’s epics, to Hesiod’s hymns, to the dialogues of Plato. These were not mere entertainments but doorways to other realms, places where the heart could breathe, where the weary spirit could find a vision of what life might be. Thus Wilson’s books are heirs to those ancient scrolls: sanctuaries for the restless, temples for the discontented soul.

To be a romantic escapist is not cowardice, but courage of another kind. It is the refusal to be crushed by dullness, the insistence that beauty, passion, and possibility must exist somewhere—and until they are found in life, they will be sought in story. Think of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the knight of windmills, who lived half in reality, half in the dreams of his romances. The world mocked him as mad, yet in his madness lay a nobility that outshone the cynicism of the so-called sane. Wilson, too, as a boy, found nobility in escaping into worlds beyond his own.

History abounds with such examples. Consider Abraham Lincoln, who, as a poor farm boy, devoured every book he could find by the dim light of a fire. His world, small and rough, could not contain his spirit. So he escaped—into tales of law, history, and human destiny. Those books shaped him into the leader who would one day speak words to free a nation. Escapism, then, is not always retreat—it can be preparation, the secret schooling of the soul for the battles that lie ahead.

The deeper meaning of Wilson’s words is this: that the world of books is not less real than the world of stone and soil. For within those pages are ideas, visions, and truths that can ignite revolutions of both the heart and the world. To dwell in them as a youth is to prepare for the journey of adulthood with a map already drawn by poets, sages, and dreamers of old. Romantic escapism is thus not the abandonment of reality, but the sharpening of one’s hunger for a greater one.

The lesson is clear: do not scorn the dreamer who seeks refuge in books, nor dismiss the youth who spends more time in imagined worlds than in the streets outside. For those imagined worlds plant seeds, and in time, those seeds may bloom into wisdom, courage, and greatness. Reading is not escape from life, but a deeper entrance into it—through symbols, stories, and the shared vision of countless souls across time.

Therefore, O listener, if you would grow, if you would rise, seek not only the experience of the world but the treasures of the written word. Let books be your companions, your teachers, your portals into worlds both real and imagined. And if you, like Wilson, find yourself a romantic escapist, rejoice—for it means your spirit has not been dulled by mediocrity, but still hungers for beauty and truth.

For in the end, those who escape into stories are often the ones who return with gifts for the world. And what greater honor is there than this—to wander into the pages of a book, and to emerge not only comforted, but transformed.