What have those mountains worth revealing?

I taught English literature in Manitoba very happily for six years. I loved teaching, it allowed me to be passionate about things I feel passionately about. In Winnipeg it was easy to get invited to big parties; if you wanted, you could have a good life. It was the 1960s, and you wouldn't need to go to bed lonely. I don't know of a more beautiful society than a North American campus at that time. There was an air of freedom, the formalities and a lot of the savageries had fallen away.

But after six years I felt I needed to go back and then come forward again, to be outside institutions, and even outside civilisation. I was glutted with culture; Europe is glutted with culture. The year before I gave up teaching, I'd been in Paris, and for the first few months of the Michaelmas term I was wrestling with it. Will I go on? Will I leave? Then three of my students came to see me just before Christmas and said, "We have a transit van and we're going on a big journey around the States, do you want to come?" So off I went with them. It was wonderful to go five, six thousand miles in a transit van, to go down, out of the ice age, and eventually hit brown, red earth down below Santa Fe, and we got out of the van and rolled in this red earth. I remember spending Christmas Eve down on the floor of the Grand Canyon, under the Palaeozoic, feeling diminished by the infinity of the space, and wondering: What kind of significance does a human have down here?

We went back up through Utah and Montana, and I thought, Christ, my Europeanness has been shaken, this is a really big country and I want to stay. I told everyone I was staying. But then, just before the end of the next term - it was Spy Wednesday - I'd gone home and I was sitting in my chair and suddenly I knew: I'm going. I was 33. I didn't feel that in leaving my job I was doing something courageous. It was more like an anguish: I have to do it, I cannot not go.

I wrote to my brother in Ireland asking him to find me somewhere to live, anywhere on the west coast from Malin Head to Mizen Head. I wanted to rediscover my bush soul, to

know what I was, outside the boundaries of my civilisation in the woods and the fields. Native Americans say that you have your soul in culture, and then there's your bush soul which is outside culture, outside civilisation. One day when I was back in Ireland, I went out to baptise myself, literally, I immersed my head three times in a river. I was supposed to go back three more times but I didn't. My bluff was called. I needed something more than nature.

Emily Bronte has written a poem about going out into the family glen, to leave the old heroic traces, leave history, leave culture. In one stanza she says, "And what have those mountains worth revealing?" It may be that you will encounter parts that you won't encounter in civilisation, and then you will need the wisdom and support of culture. I am hugely and enormously grateful to culture. A book to me isn't matter to read, it's, will it take me through the night? These books that you see around me here have been one way of getting through the night. I'm not reading them as a professor or a critic, I'm reading them because they nourish me.

One of the things that did worry me when I came back to Ireland was, how am I going to do without female company, and of course I discovered that the need wasn't nearly so urgent as it had been in Canada. You were out every day, going out into the country, climbing mountains, running along the top of mountains, sometimes with hailstones against you. All your muscles were delightfully aching, so you were sensuous right throughout your body. The rain against you was a sensuousness, the wind was a sensuousness. It was a wonderful, intense and sensuous life. I was wild, I was happy - don't fence me in! And I wasn't being fenced in. It was wonderful, it was crazy and wonderful. And I crashed. I was myself the iceberg against which I crashed. Seeking your bush soul is dangerous. What I did was a bit reckless. I'm not talking heroics; I was doing what I yearned to do, it was impassioned, but I needed to get back to culture again.