Frank awakening

Almost fifty years ago, in my college roommate Jim's home, in Pittsburgh, I picked up his parents' copy of My Life & Loves by Frank Harris (1856-1931). It could have been the same 1963 Grove Press edition that I borrowed this afternoon from a UNC library, for I no doubt went home with Jim that year, as I did every year I was at Yale. As a barely experienced 20-year-old, I of course pricked up to Harris's candid descriptions of his sex life. Now, at about the age of Harris when he was writing his memoir, while I can still manage a somewhat hard-on, I've at last picked up the book to read the whole thing (all 983 pages, if I peruse the index).

Actually, I'm reading a copy on tape from the Library for the Blind & Physically Handicapped. Last night, listening with ear phones so as not to attract the attention of my wife, I was struck by the following passage at the end of Chapter III, in which Harris depicts his boyhood reflections on the recent thrill of having copped a feel from the French maid Lucille:

It was the awakening of sex-life in me, I believe, that first revealed to me the beauty of inanimate nature.
    A night or two later I was ravished by a moon nearly at the full that flooded our playing field with ivory radiance, making the haystack in the corner a thing of supernal beauty.
    Why had I never before seen the wonder of the world, the sheer loveliness of nature all about me? From this time on I began to enjoy descriptions of scenery in the books I read, and began, too, to love landscapes in painting.
    Thank goodness!...From that day on I began to live an enchanted life, for at once I tried to see beauty everywhere, and at all times of day and night caught glimpses that ravished me with delight and turned my being into a hymn of praise and joy.
    Faith had left me, and with faith, I was as one in prison with an undetermined sentence; but now in a moment the prison had become a paradise, the walls of the actual had fallen away into frames of entrancing pictures. Dimly I became conscious that if this life were sordid and mean, petty and unpleasant, the fault was in myself and in my blindness. I began then for the first time to understand that I myself was a magician and could create my own fairyland....
    ...I find that I am outrunning my story and giving here a stage of thought and belief that only became mine much later; but the beginning of my individual soul-life was [the encounter with Lucille], that I had been blind to natural beauty and now could see; [that experience] was the root and germ, so to speak, of the later faith that guided all my mature life, filling me with courage and spilling over into hope and joy ineffable.... [p. 47]