(Syracuse, NY): We’re stuck in my hometown after Thanksgiving weekend because of a delayed flight. Over the weekend, my wife Laura and I measured the bookshelves in the house where I grew up. We estimate that my Dad has filled 2,663 linear feet of shelving with his books, which he has collected over fifty years in several countries. We were interested in the aggregate length of his shelving because all of us want to know how much space the books would occupy if we had to move them. Apparently, we would need about 110 standard-size, eight-shelf bookcases–but since Dad really packs the books in tightly, I think we might need 125. We didn’t count volumes, but a rough estimate would be 27,000-30,000.

Sometimes an increase in quantity causes a change in quality. To grow up in a smallish house that contains that many books is to grow up in a different kind of place: a library rather than a standard home. The books were unusual, too. Most were published before 1900 and some are as old as the late 1500s. They are musty, worn, crumbly, well-traveled, and well used.

Social scientists often ask children how many books are in their homes, because this is a proxy for socio-economic status (SES). Kids can estimate numbers of books better than they can guess their own parents’ incomes and educational credentials. By that measure, I was enormously privileged–far better off than any billionaire’s kid. In reality, there may have been some diminishing returns after the first, say, 20,000 volumes arrived in our home. But it was a privilege to grow up amid so much vellum and parchment and so many carefully written words.

If you’ve spent substantial time in a second country, you probably recognize certain qualities of everyday life that distinguish that nation from your own: for example, the smell of common cleaning products, the items on menus of cheap eateries, the uniforms of bus drivers and janitors, the cadences of conversations that you cannot quite hear, the shape of electrical outlets, the most common building materials, whether or not packs of teenage girls hold hands as they walk down the street, the layout of sidewalks, the taste of popular candy bars and soft drinks, the typography of signs, and the color of light from streetlamps.

Having been a kid in both England and upstate New York, I always felt I could recognize the essential texture of Englishness–which is most concentrated in places that tourists never go, like school lunchrooms, suburban playgrounds, and doctors’ offices (“surgeries”). Lately, however, on trips to the Low Countries and Scandinavia, I have begun to wonder whether what I thought was English, or perhaps British, is actually the shared vernacular culture of Europe north of France. For instance:

1. A sandwich shop where I ate in Antwerp could have been in London, save for the language. The daily menu on the chalk board standing on the sidewalk, the food itself, the clientele–businessmen in a certain kind of suit–all could be found in Soho.

2. The snack bar outside the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo resembled innumerable such shops outside of “stately homes,” public gardens, and archaeological sites in England, ca. 1980. There was something about the list of ice cream novelties, the typography of the sign, the summer sunlight at that northern latitude, and the line of expectant schoolchildren with pocket-money that I would have considered essentially British.

3. At the Nordbrabantsmuseum in ‘s-Hertogensbosch, the Netherlands, a reconstructed kitchen from the 1930s reminded me of similar displays in South Kensington and in provincial British museums–not only because the kitchen and its supplies looked English, but also because a certain nostalgia had caused it to be rebuilt in a museum.

I’m starting to think that there’s a Northern-European vernacular that stops at the French border. Did it originate in Victorian England and spread across the north of the continent in the age of English dominance? Or does it reflect some profound commonality among the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and Norsemen who settled modern England?

Ever since I was about eight years old, my routine has always included frequent walks. Even now, my daily commute involves about 50 minutes of walking as well as a Metro ride. The time that I spend alone on the sidewalks of Washington and Maryland seems continuous with the walks that I started as early as 1975. Personal identity is nothing but a story we tell ourselves; we select a few instances from the countless events of our past and make them definitive of an “I” that is, in reality, less distinctive, consistent, and separate from its context than we like to believe. As I tell myself a story about my self, I can find no deeper continuity than the series of walks I have taken since childhood and the meandering thoughts that have accompanied them.

As I grew up, my family mainly alternated between Syracuse, NY and London. I think I first walked alone frequently in Syracuse, going to school (often with friends but sometimes on my own) or strolling in the neighborhood. And what did I think about as I walked on those steep sidewalks cracked by old roots, past hippy group houses or the Arts-and-Crafts bungalows of faculty families–or between high heaps of dog-stained Syracuse snow? Mostly fantasies of adventure, I think. I also puzzled through questions of history and politics, addressing that silent inner student whom I suspect we all use as our primary audience.

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On Crooked Timber recently, Harry Brighouse observed that graduate students in philosophy are wise not to publish too much. If they do choose to publish, they should reserve their work for prestigious journals. He wasn’t too sure about the hierarchy of prestige, but Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs were clearly top venues in his field (which is also, nominally, mine).

This whole discussion fills me with a vague anxiety that I rarely feel at my current stage of life. It transports me back 10 or 15 years to my days as a grad student and aspiring professor. I was extremely fortunate in some ways: for example, my doctorate was free. However, studying abroad and very much on my own, I received absolutely no tactical advice about how to play the academic game. So the idea that you shouldn’t publish would never have occurred to me.

Brighouse’s post provoked some discussion of the major journals. I admire the work that appears in venues like Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs. I must have read 50 articles from those publications in my life. Most have been difficult, challenging, and rigorous. But I don’t read the journals regularly or keep up with the overall discipline of philosophy in any organized way.

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