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In the famous troubles of 1968 and 1969, I was in some of the roughest spots — Harvard, Frankfurt — but the students absolutely respected an unreconstructed Platonist like myself. I had no trouble. They detested, they disagreed, but they knew that I felt passionately. They came to feel only contemp…

Let me put it another way. From western Portugal to St. Petersburg, you have cafés, places where you can come in the morning, order a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, spend the day reading the world's newspapers, playing chess and writing. The bibliography of magnificent books written in cafés is …

Eastern Europe and Latin America, I think, almost without doubt. Great writing, great thinking, flourishes under pressure. Thinking is a lonely, cancerous, autistic, mad business: to be able to concentrate deeply, innerly. Very few people know how to think; real focused thinking is about the most d…

his words cut through me at that time: the authority of that man, the charisma, the apodictic contempt in that statement. So I accepted.

This is a very peculiar form of heresy. It's a form of Manichaeanism. And I call myself a Manichaean, a rather baffled Manichaean