The Last Days of the Round Reading Room at the British Museum and the British Library - and a Pleasant Encounter
Another wave of nostalgia breaks over me as I pick up a forgotten book that influenced my past thinking in many ways, Colin Wilson's remarkable and increasingly relevant 'The Outsider' , written in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum. Too poor to rent a room, he slept at night in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath in London. He spent his days reading and writing in that intellectual domain, searching for the nature of a more permanent heightened reality above the banality of everyday life. N ostalgia has been sweeping over me recently for past excitements, well submerging me really, as I contemplate republishing a few of my books in foreign language editions. In December 2024 I again decided to visit the British Museum to see the outstanding Silk Roads Exhibition. Of course I decided to once again enter my library meta-universe as my entire life and creeping age appears to have become a museum object in itself. ...
