Letter from America Jim Holt
NEW YORK: I have reached that happy time in my life where I rarely have occasion to go out after dark. If I hear the chimes at midnight, it is probably in my dreams.
But once a month I make an exception. At around 7pm I leave my Greenwich Village apartment, hop on the F train, and get out at 57th Street. From there I make my way to the only cheap French restaurant in midtown Manhattan, La Bonne Soupe, where I meet up with a motley crew of friends: Chaim, a bassist in a jazz band; James, a Wall Street bond-trader; Malcolm, the circulation manager for a Marxist monthly; Anthony, a former editor at the Economist; Jennifer, who makes film documentaries about Harlem; and Paul and David, two Oxford philosophers who have fetched up in New York. None of us are in our first youth – which is perhaps why we are all happy with same old quiche Lorraine and steak haché that La Bonne Soupe has been serving for the past five decades.
After finishing our dinner, and slightly squiffy from a couple of bumpers of Gigondas, we walk together a few blocks uptown, some of us puffing on postprandial Gauloise cigarettes, to Anthony’s apartment near Columbus Circle. There we cosily install ourselves on a sofa and an array of easy chairs, with cups of espresso, chocolate Leibniz biscuits and (for me at least) more bumpers of wine. After a little small talk, we get down to hard business. We have come talk about ideas.
And it’s not just talk. It’s intense, point-scoring, sometimes even testy argument – argument about ‘analyticity’ and ‘apriority’, about the possibility of objective moral judgements, about whether we might all be brains in a vat or patterns in a Matrix-like computer simulation. We insult each other. (‘The point I’m making is an a posteriori one.’ ‘Yes, you pulled it out of your ass.’) And the parley won’t break up until midnight, when – exhilarated by the to-and-fro of ideas – I gallop the fifty-odd blocks home down a relatively deserted Fifth Avenue.
We are a philosophy club. We’ve been doing this every month, with some turnover in membership, for more than a dozen years. We fatuously call ourselves (with a nod to the part of Manhattan where we meet) the ‘Columbus Circle’.
Are we unusual? Not at all. Most of my mature acquaintances in Manhattan have done serious time in some sort of intellectual circle or cenacle or salon. After a long day’s work, they get together in the evening hours to eat and drink and bat around ideas. Our group argues about philosophy. The retired guy who lives downstairs from me runs a group whose theme is ‘knowledge, technology and social systems’. A bunch of Rightwingers I know used to meet up in a palatial town house on the Upper East Side to eat foie gras, drink Château d’yquem, and talk about Leo Strauss and T S Eliot and Ayn Rand. Fittingly, they called themselves the Vile Body.
Book groups are the most common manifestation of this trend. They abound on Manhattan’s Upper West Side – ‘the coffee-breath of neighbourhoods’ – where the novels of Elena Ferrante and Thomas Bernhard are hotly discussed every night up and down West End Avenue.
The most impressive Manhattan book salon I know of is the legendary ‘Proust Group’, whose dozen or so original members bear New York pedigrees more aristocratic than the Guermantes themselves. They began in 1971 by reading all of Proust, volume by volume, and exchanging their literary frissons and longueurs each month over a Sunday-evening dinner. Having dispatched Proust, they proceeded to plough through Tolstoy, Dostoevksy, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Mann, Faulkner, Nabokov, Austen and Trollope over the next quarter-century. Then they did Proust again – all of it. I think a few of them are still alive.
Why this amateur passion for connecting socially over literature, over philosophy, over ideas? I would like to say that it is universal among New Yorkers. But it is not. It is mostly confined to the rather young and the rather old. On those rare occasions where I find myself talking about ideas at a cocktail party, it’s usually with someone just out of Harvard or Yale who got a job as a fact-checker at the New Yorker. They’re the only ones who haven’t yet been jaded by the Gotham whirl of power politics and gossip.
But as you move toward late middle age, you start to worry: is gossip enough to keep me cerebrally spry? The awful spectre of dementia looms over the horizon. How to stave it off? Ideas! The more educated you are, the better your odds of beating dementia even as you get older and fatter (and uglier). This is what science seems to tell us. It’s called the ‘cognitive reserve’ hypothesis: the more numerous and complicated the neural connections in your brain, the more robustly it resists the erosion of time. And how better to ensure this robustness than by getting together with your pretentious friends at regular intervals to quibble over logical positivism, or phenomenology, or Proust? That’s what the grey-hair set does in New York. We leave crossword puzzles and TV quiz shows to the hinterlanders.
So in 2017 I’m looking forward to another year of intense (and squiffy) amateur philosophising with my fellow members of the Columbus Circle. And to hedge my cerebral bets, I’m also struggling to make sense of General Relativity and to learn Italian. The latter is already paying dividends. I am now able to converse a little with my Sicilian barber – whose beautiful name is Alberto Amore – in his native tongue as he cuts my hair. He calls me ‘Jimmy Italiano’.
‘The spectre of dementia looms. How to stave it off? Ideas!’