I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of n… - John Banville

I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect.

I never learned the names of the streets because I couldn't wait to get out. It was too small and I was bored. I was a pretentious little twerp and I had ideas above my station, which everyone should have. I was deeply ambitious but I was deeply dismissive of what was there and that was a mistake. Wexford was a fascinating town and so was the society. I remember a friend of mine telling me about wife-swapping parties that went on there and how people would throw their keys into the middle of a bowl. This was the late 1950s. I didn't believe a word of it. If I believed him and looked about, I would have found another version of Wexford. I'm not saying that I wanted to be at wife-swapping parties, but the Wexford I imagined wasn't necessarily the Wexford that was real. So I blinded myself and I was just as narrow-minded and blinkered as the people whom I despised there. That was a mistake.

As a boy I was very solitary but blissfully happy. We lived on the edge of town in Wexford and I wandered the fields with my dog, declaiming Keats to the trees.