I first met Jim in New York in August 1970. I had been in New York for three days. He invited me to go to a concert with him in Central Park to hear Alicia de Larrocha play Liszt and Ravel. It was a dramatic pause in my first few days of furious tourism.

The skyscrapers of the city rise in mammoth terraces all around the steaming, wide open ground. The tiny hand-span of the lady playing the grand piano in the park belies the immensity of the sound which, beyond nature and technē, soars into the empyrean. In the intervals, Jim tells me about his work on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. I feel the stirrings again of my original passion for philosophy, which three years at Oxford have almost completely expunged. Instead of staying in New York for the three weeks planned, I decide to stay for a year.

It was my Lehrjahr, my real apprenticeship, after the borniert complacencies of my undergraduate education. What did I discover in that year? Jim, continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger), the Second Vienna School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg), Abstract Expressionism (Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis), cooking (out of Craig Claiborne and Alice B. Toklas), hashish, LSD, popular music (Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones—yes, in New York!), homosexuality, Jim, Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, the German language, Harlem (where I taught black teenage delinquents to read, two afternoons a week), Adorno, Jim.