As children say, he was "being" a novitiate, he was not really one, just as Sartre's waiter was "being" a waiter, as, duty-bound, he attended almost too assiduously to his clients' needs. He felt that while others were really pious, he played the pious part, swinging the incense just a little too enthusiastically. Holloway's apparently bottomless candour reveals a touch of bad faith, even at Kelham. The Christian faith, indeed, might well have absorbed and satisfied him if its institutions had not so often demanded not mere faith but dogmatic certainty. It was his romantic imagination that "propelled" him to embrace the monastic rigours of Kelham and to love and understand its ethos.
In a less Wordsworthian spirit, he sought this "something more" in the American movies he loved, many of them westerns. He used to walk miles in the hills above the Leven Valley, usually alone, feeling the yearning for that something more, something nameless of which the landscape spoke but which eluded him. Before he was 14, when he went to board at Kelham, the Anglican seminary in the Midlands that prepared boys for the priesthood, he had experienced the "latency" of landscape. The difference between Hume and Holloway is that Holloway is a romantic.
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