Each class was equally bewildering, covering a diverse range of topics. He tried to encourage me to engage him in Socratic dialogues, but he wound up doing both parts himself. When there was a blackout during an electrical storm, Dad would light a candle and hold it under his chin to show me how the human face becomes a mask of evil with the right kind of lighting. He taught me that if I had to meet someone for an appointment, I must refuse to follow the “stupid human habit” of arbitrarily choosing a time based on fifteen-minute intervals. “Never meet people at 7:45 or 6:30, Jasper, but pick times like 7:12 and 8:03!” If the phone rang, he’d pick it up and not say anything- then, when the other person said hello, he would put on a wobbly, high-pitched voice and say, “Dad not home.” Even as a child I knew that a grown man impersonating his six-year-old son to hide from the world was grotesque, but many years later I found myself doing the same thing, only I’d pretend to be him. “My son isn’t home. What is this regarding?” I’d boom. Dad would nod in approval. More than anything, he approved of hiding.

These lessons continued into the outside world too, where Dad tried to teach me the art of bartering, even though we weren’t living in that type of society. I remember him taking me by the hand to buy the newspaper, screaming at the baffled vendor, “No wars! No market crashes! No killers on the loose! What are you charging so much for? Nothing’s happened!”

I also remember him sitting me on a plastic yellow chair and cutting my hair; to him, it was one of those things in life that was so unlike brain surgery he refused to believe that if a man had a pair of hands and a pair of scissors he couldn’t cut hair. “I’m not wasting money on a barber, Jasper. What’s to know? Obviously, you stop at the scalp.” My father the philosopher- he couldn’t even give a simple haircut without reflecting on the meaning of it.