I was still going to church at the ages of eighteen and nineteen, when I got back, but that was about the time I drifted away. It didn’t happen like a thunderclap. I lived in a strict household, and when my parents thought I was going to Mass, I’d walk down to the milk bar and sit there drinking a malted milk and reading a sporting paper until the hour was up. Then I’d walk home. I marvel at the fact that the religion that I was brought up in—all the talk of God and angels and eternal salvation—never reached the part of me that fiction and poetry reached. To get away from those beliefs of eighteen or nineteen years, I actually did have to be some kind of atheistic, Freudian sort of hedonistic person to start with. But I didn’t want to be a pagan—I didn’t want to run away from Catholicism to the opposite extreme. I learned the whole of A Shropshire Lad in my nineteenth year, and in Housman I found an alternative. I was sort of obsessed with it. The greens of England suggested not a vivid, red-colored, pagan sexuality and not the black-and-white certainties of Catholicism but the cultivation of the poetic emotions, as I would’ve called them. I suppose I had to grow up to learn that the realm, let’s call it, of poetry and fiction and horse racing and music was the utmost realm, that religion was just a man-made concept of a lower order, and that all the satisfaction I wanted from existence, from my own life, lay in the direction of poetry, fiction, music, and horse racing and not in the direction of religion, and that those states of being or feelings or states of awareness that came to me while I was reading poetry or fiction, or while I was watching or reflecting on horse races or listening to music or playing it, pointed in the direction that my life was going.