notes--and on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides east and
west and north and south, and to enlarging and broadening the sense of
great swarming hinterlands of humanity with whom I had no dealings, of
whom I knew nothing....

The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite and
sometimes outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent meanings.

It wasn't simply that I received a vast impression of space and
multitude and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly dragged
from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness of
perception. Close at hand in the big art museum I came for the first
time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto held to be a
shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beauty
as not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand
hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture,
I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for
the first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony....

My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a quickened
apprehension of persons. A constant stream of people passed by me,
eyes met and challenged mine and passed--more and more I wanted then to
stay--if I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my
boyish inexperience softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as
they passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured
strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets and
papers full of strange and daring ideas transcending one's boldest; in
the parks one heard men discussing the very existence of God, denying
the rights of property, debating a hundred things that one dared not