Kierkegaard hated philosophy in the grand style. He was no system builder. Instead, he was always after an intimate truth. Philosophy, for him, was about an individual human being grappling with exactly what it means to be alive, to make decisions, to go one way and not another. Kierkegaard wanted us to be terrified in the face of life because in doing so we might come to the uncomfortable realization that it matters very much.

"I'm alive. You be too."

"My education was deeply spotty, but Diana was amazing." What did she teach you? "Chiefly, how to gut books. She would say of some sacred text, such as [Stendhal's] Charterhouse of Parma, that it was about a rather silly boy. She had a son called Alexander who wasn't quite right in the head. She couldn't read Proust because she knew enough about the book to know it was about a very delicate boy, and it would perhaps have been too much for her."

Hodgkin is now lost in the upsetting memory of Diana and Alexander. "She taught him to speak fluent Russian. And she always insisted that his opinions on films were important. Somebody would say, dismissively, 'Why would Alexander know?' and she'd say, 'Alexander just knows.'" What is making him cry now? "Something she said." He says something, but it's lost in sobs. I ask him to repeat it. "She said, 'If you love someone, you include them in your life in any way you can.'" Out of homage to Diana, perhaps, he never read Proust.

Still, I could feel this thing between us, not just lust but a kind of immediate love, the sort that, like instant oatmeal, can be realized in a matter of minutes and is just as nutritious as the real thing.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s all fun? Even though we torture ourselves and get upset, everything is going to be O.K.? It’s not O.K.?”

Despite being firmly settled in England, he still comes over as foreign, and his books often sell better abroad. But he writes and speaks perfect English so the foreignness is a bit of a mystery. Partly, it's his exquisite manners and neat appearance, but also a constant need for deep, meaningful conversations. He says his wife often gets irritated when he launches in at breakfast and she says: "Look, I can't deal with this now, save it for later." But he has a friend in Australia who will ring up and say without preamble, "What is shyness?", which is his idea of a good conversation.

At dinner parties he likes to launch a topic ("What is the best form of government?") rather than make small talk. Or he asks people questions until they get irritated. He complains: "There is a coldness in English social life. No one reveals anything, says anything that is in any way naked, vulnerable, interesting, honest, and that does frustrate me."

What finally makes your destiny is not prophecy, not gods, not a certain set of coordinates and constellations. What tells you you have reached the place where you should be is that you journeyed there. You fought and grieved and loved, did the right thing as much as you could, did the wrong thing more often than you care to remember, and did the necessary thing as often as it took. You spent nearly every ounce of life and will and got somewhere with as many people you loved as you could bring along with you. You have expended yourself and provided for the next generation and are getting ready to die, and you are in your last place.

A thousand tropics in an apple blossom. The generous earth itself gave us lief. The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened. I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame.

To outsiders, this looks hilarious. But making fun of earnest people is not fair, They see a noble tradition defenseless in an unchartered, treacherous world. They want to protect what they love.

CROSSWORDS

If only marriages were more like these,
One hundred little clues for men and wives
That lead (if we are smart) with relative ease
To the bottom right-hand corners of our lives.
Alas, when I am down you’re sometimes cross,
My little white squares run into your black.
At other times it’s me who’s at a loss
For soothing words, and you who feels their lack.
Sometimes we put down words before we think
And later find they cannot be erased.
We write them not with pencils but in ink
And in that way the grid becomes defaced.
But nonetheless, I’ll love you, my dear wife,
Till the bottom right-hand corner of my life.

When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night . . .

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props

I can't believe the 700 Hobo Names Guy made me cry.

According to Putnam (who is here following Levinas), we can transcend ourselves through a rather strict adherence to ethics. If we truly believed that we were unique, we would not restrict our loving-kindness to those who were like us, as is so often the case. Our benevolence would extend towards everyone. Of course, we cannot be reasoned into this sense of responsibility. We cannot base it on the order of nature. Quite the opposite. Responsibility of this order makes us reach beyond our daily concerns. It is a mundane repetition of Abraham’s “hineni,” his “here I am” in the presence of God. Just as the children of Israel accepted the yoke of the Law when they said, “We will obey and we will hear,” those who lead the ethical life obey the summons of responsibility before they ask why they should. It is there—beyond survival, beyond desire and beyond personal advantage—that they rise above nature. It is there that they sense God’s path through the world.

We finished the ride easily, but I do not know if she is still waiting.