And he couldn’t have helped having that interest, anyway, even if he struggled against it, which I think that he did. Because he was born with the temperament of an artist, and every artist is susceptible to the kind of curiosity and carnality that much of religion (at least in the Christian sense) warns against; because, in order to reproduce the reality of experience, through the mimesis that is art, an artist needs to (or thinks they need to) plunge themselves into every possible variety of experience, to know it fully.