I’m reading Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, a 750-page book with one dominant theme. Fire, riot, real-estate speculation, bombs, and state planning have caused constant and brutal change throughout London’s 2000 years. But despite all this disruption, many streets and districts mysteriously retain consistent functions and characters over very long periods. Sometimes a place will have a modern use (and name) that evokes the same site before the Romans arrived.

I think Ackroyd sometimes stretches a point and is not perfectly reliable. However, his theme has personal resonance for me. I partly grew up in London, spending five school years there, plus every summer (save one) until I was nineteen. We usually rented a new home each year, so we lived all over the city. Now I return with my own family almost annually. Thus I have seen London’s evolution since the 1970s in a kind of freeze-frame–skyscrapers sprouting; cockney cafes giving way to Starbucks; Bangladeshis following Ugandan Indians and Jamaicans; bowler hats, Mohawks, and backwards baseball caps in procession. In my lifetime, London has extended its ancient pattern of destruction, immigration, and reconstruction.

As a child, I was deeply interested in London’s history. This interest came from two main sources, my parents and my school. My mother took us down to the muddy banks of the tidal Thames to dig up clay pipe stems from pre-industrial times and helped me find chalk fossil shells deposited eons earlier. We also went on guided walking tours. I especially recall a geologist’s tour of the stone used in West End buildings; a walk along the remains of the Roman wall (which now runs through the glass blocks of the financial center); and nighttime visits to the Tower of London, led by a Beefeater. We went to the theater often, and such plays as Bartholomew’s Fair and The Knight of the Burning Pestle evoked old London for me.

For three years, I attended the only state primary school within the City of London, Prior Weston. The imaginative, progressive faculty emphasized local history. They made their mix of cockney and yuppie students feel citizens of the old London “commune,” with its guilds, monastic orders, councils, traditions, and civic privileges. The city was being torn up then, as usual, huge towers rising from bomb sites. Ugly and anonymous as the new buildings were, they followed ancient roads and their foundations laid bare the remnants of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Medieval, Tudor, Stuart, and Victorian London. I was especially possessive of the bomb site next to our school, which we viewed as a “nature preserve,” since it had sprouted wild flowers and sheltered hardy urban birds. We agitated to preserve it, but a massive building soon appeared in its place. Meanwhile, outside the school’s main door, vegetables were still sold from wooden barrows as they had been for a thousand years.

I graduated from high school two years after A Nation at Risk (1983). Although my friends and I had some fine teachers, the curriculum and standards were pretty slack back then. As I recall, we rarely had to bring homework home; it could be done during the lunch break. However, there were two good things about my schools in Syracuse, NY. First, the population was split almost exactly 50/50 between African Americans and Whites. That was fairly unusual in those days, and extremely rare today. Last year, I helped some students in Maryland to conduct an oral history of race in their high school, and they found that the late-70s was the high point of integration.

Secondly, I had several friends and classmates who were intensely intellectual, and specifically interested in the moral aspects of politics and public policy. In addition to me, three others are philosophy professors today, one is an economist who teaches public policy, and one is a lawyer who writes about American history. We wasted plenty of time back then, but we also spent some of the hours that today we’d have to devote to homework reading good books for fun and arguing about what we’d read.

We mostly read different things, of course. But philosophy of science was popular, and most of us read Thomas Kuhn and Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach and The Mind’s I). I think the most popular fiction included Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and anti-totalitarian political novels by Koestler, Malraux, and Orwell. More than one of us read Solzhenitsyn, although I certainly didn’t finish any of his novels. Mid-twentieth century American fiction was still influential: Faulkner and Hemmingway, especially. I read a lot of Freud’s case studies. I didn’t read much political commentary, but others subscribed to The New Republic and everyone read the New York Times, although I cannot remember how regularly.

Five years later, I enrolled at Oxford for a doctorate and discovered that the University offered very few graduate seminars, no qualifying papers, and no exams. However, there were many intense graduate students, and we organized ourselves in informal seminars. Once again, I missed the benefits of a rigorous and demanding curriculum, but found that free time can be deeply educational if your fellow students push you.

My father owns about 20,000 books. They line virtually every wall in my parents’ house and fill library-style stacks in the basement, often two rows deep or piled horizontally on the shelves for greater efficiency. There are university press books without dustcovers, paperback classics, coffee-table art books, and many leather-bound volumes, some 450 years old. As a child, I often went along while Dad browsed and shopped. Thus I remember …

A grimy stretch of Farringdon Road in the City of London, between the headquarters of the then-Communist Daily Star and some open Underground lines. As the last vestige of a Saturday-morning book market, there were five or six “barrows” (the wooden carts used for selling produce) filled with books. George Jeffries, the last of the Farringdon Road wholesalers, would buy his stock during the previous week at estate sales. His goal was to get rid of books as quickly as possible, to avoid storage costs. Each barrow was covered with a mound of books under a canvass. Shop owners and a few hardy collectors would surround the pile, jostling for position. George would pull the canvass off and they would tear through the tattered paperbacks, magazines, instructional manuals, catalogs, and old Latin volumes. They would rush their prizes to the wall along the rail lines, where each shopper?s pile was off-limits to his rivals, and then elbow their way back to the main action. Meanwhile, I would sit on my Dad?s pile reading Enid Blyton books, or stroll up and down along the wall daydreaming about adventures of my own, or browse through magazines and children?s books that I had found on the barrows once the grim professionals had moved on.

George was himself a Communist with wild hair and terrible teeth who vacationed on the Soviet Black Sea, yet he was a ruthless entrepreneur. And apparently a chauvinist: he took his sons to the Crimean beaches, but not his wife and daughter. Among his regular customers was a lady who wore a motorcycle helmet into the scrimmage around the barrows. But I also remember …

The last of the Fourth Avenue used bookstores in New York, of which the Strand is the monopolistic survivor. Once there were many little stores, jammed with paperbacks and battered hardcovers, lit with bare electric bulbs, enlivened by jazz l.p.’s, and frequented by graduate students, professors, and seedy independent intellectuals who might argue in loud New York accents. Again, I’d sit on stacks of books, reading Hardy Boys mysteries or Landmark biographies of Thomas Edison or Geronimo. And in those same years, I remember …

Lilies, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire: a rambling old mansion in a substantial park. Its parlors with overstuffed chintz furniture, its creaky attic hallways–all were lined with books for sale. Dad and I would walk from Aylesbury along the side of the highway. He would work his way from room to room while I read Gerald Durrell or Roald Dahl or walked through the woods. Tea would be served in the late afternoon, usually to three or four customers. There was supposed to be a ghost, but he waited until after closing time to haunt. And then I remember …

Book-filled barns in upstate New York, with cats and maybe chickens, NPR in the background, and country smells competing with the books’ must … the antiquarian books of Paris, each wrapped in translucent paper, sold from wooden boxes that were locked to the embankment walls of the Seine … half-timbered houses in quaint English country towns with bookshelves nailed to every available space, even under the winding staircases … Second Story’s warehouse in suburban Rockville, MD, where books were once priced at $1 per full cardboard box … Bryn Mawr alumnae bookshops in several American cities, staffed by tweedy volunteers from the class of ’55 … and sweaty high school gyms with books on the tables at 25 cents each.

I admit it–I “ego-surf” now and then. Searching for my own name last week, I discovered that the Lord Mayor of London is none other than Peter Levine. This eminent person (no relation) gave a speech in California entitled “We Reinvented Government Before You Did.” When English youths looted a McDonalds, he remarked, “These people, many with sincere points to make, allied themselves to a mob. The whole point they were trying to make has been lost.” As Yoggi Berra exclaimed when he found out that the Lord Mayor of Dublin was Jewish, “Only in America!”

The City of London, by the way, is the single square mile within Greater London that was originally settled by the Romans and then walled during the Middle Ages. The Lord Mayor is an honorary leader of this district, which has no real political autonomy. During the school year when I turned 7, and again when I turned 10, I attended the Prior Weston School, which was one of the very few state schools inside the City of London. In fact, it was almost underneath the Barbican, the huge (and terribly ugly) residential/arts complex that they were building in those years. Immediately next to the school was a bomb site, still left over from WWII, which we students wanted to turn into a nature sanctuary. (In the spring, it buzzed with life: bees, weedy flowers, centipedes, snails.) In the street outside the school, there was an old-fashioned vegetable market with produce on wheeled wooden “barrows” and grizzled old gents shouting their prices. We used to pick leftover lettuce and carrots out of the gutters to feed the school’s pet rabbits.

This was the seventies, and Prior Weston was a progressive school run by a Christian socialist named Henry Pluckrose. The student body was part genuine Cockney: working class kids born within the sound of Bow Bells. There were also yuppie families from Islington, which was then gentrifying.

I mention all this because we were taught a lot of local social history at Prior Weston, which made us feel like citizens of the ancient City. We went to see the new Lord Mayor in his gilded coach-and-six, but we also studied the more plebeian past of Celts and Romans, medieval guilds and town criers, friars and Knights of St. John, Dick Whittington and his cat, puritans and actors, plagues and fires, bells and town criers. So it doesn’t seem so very strange that my namesake is now the Lord Mayor.

In between work on youth civic engagement, I’m writing a book about moral philosophy, using Dante as the main text. I recently remembered a relevant but unpublished article that I had written about 1991–when I was approximately 24 and finishing graduate school. Although I couldn’t find an electronic copy of the essay, I did manage to dig up an old dot-matrix printout of it, with corrections pasted over the mistakes to save printer paper. I remembered nothing about the content, so reading it was like reading someone else’s work, except that I happened to own the intellectual property rights. I’m not sure that I want to reuse any of it in my current work, because the argument is now rather unfamiliar to me, and I haven’t decided what I think of it. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I cannot do philosophical work that’s much (or any?) better than that article today. This is disturbing, to say the least, because I don’t think of myself as being much of a scholar ca. 1991. I certainly had difficulties getting things published in those days, and probably for good reason. Yet I have no confidence that my current book-in-progress is any better than that old article. At any rate, it starts with a good quote (from the preface to Dewey’s Philosophy and Civilization, 1931):

philosophy, like politics, literature and the plastic arts, is itself a phenomenon of human culture. Its connection with social history, with civilization, is intrinsic. There is current among those who philosophize the conviction that, while past thinkers have reflected in their systems the conditions and perplexities of their own day, present-day philosophy in general, and one’s own philosophy in particular, is emancipated from the influence of that complex of institutions which forms a culture. Bacon, Descartes, Kant each though with fervor that he was founding it anew philosophy because he was placing it securely upon an exclusive intellectual basis, exclusive, that is, of everything but intellect. The movement of time has revealed the illusion. … Philosophers are part of history, caught in its movement; creators perhaps in some measure of its future, but also assuredly creatures of its past.