Colm Tóibín at the NYRB:
I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain just after my eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic upbringing would soon mean little to me. During my first year at university, which I had just completed, I told no one that I had come close to joining a seminary. Some of my memories of almost having a vocation for the priesthood were embarrassing. I wished they belonged to someone else. But now my religious feelings had not merely ended; I hoped they had been effectively erased. Such feelings, I noticed, were mostly absent from the books I was reading, the films I was watching, the plays I was seeing, the conversations I was having.
Even the religion in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed remote. Joyce himself—and Stephen Dedalus in the novel—had attended the same university where I was now studying, but the campus had moved to the Dublin suburbs; the new buildings were glass and steel, worlds away from the intimacy of Newman House in the center of Dublin where Joyce (and Stephen) had studied.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.