It was its pleasures I was in search of. Soon, I was tearing across Paris; then I went to Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna. I did the churches and museums of Italy, and they did me. It wasn’t long before I’d had my fill of degraded, orgasmically violated bodies strung from walls, and vaults full of old bones. On most days I woke up in a different place. I traveled by train and bus, in the slowest possible way. Sometimes I just walked across mountains, beaches, or fields, or got off trains when I fancied the view from the window. If I liked a bus—the route, the thoughts it provoked, the width of the seat, or a sentence in a book I was reading on it—I’d sit there until the end of the line. There was no rush.

I stayed in cheap hotels, hostels, and boarding houses. I had money, but I didn’t want opulence. As a young man I’d wanted that—as a measure of success and of how far I had escaped my childhood. Now it seemed confining to be overconcerned with furnishings.

I talked only to strangers, making friends easily for the first time in years. I met people in cafés, museums, and clubs, and went to their houses when I could. If I had been too fastidious before, now I stayed with anyone who would have me, to see how they lived. Unlike most young people, I was interested in people of all ages. I’d go to the house of a Dutch guy of my age, and end up chatting to his parents all weekend. It was the mothers I got along with because I was interested in children and how you might get through to them. The mothers talked about children, but I learned they were talking about themselves, too, and this moved me.

I did, at least, know how to look after myself. I could escape anyone boring. People were more generous than I had noticed. If you could listen, they liked to talk. Perhaps being ambitious and relatively well known from a young age had put the barrier of my reputation, such as it was, between me and others.