Читать книгу What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth - Страница 9

We’re teaching our sons about philosophy.

We’re discussing logic, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. We’re covering philosophical methods of inquiry, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind. We’re asking our sons to consider ‘if there is something that it is like to be a particular thing’.

We’re on a boat trip up a Norwegian fjord and our sons are gathered on deck to listen to our lecture series. The spectacular mountains slide by as we talk about the sublime. The steel deck is wet from the recent rain.

Our sons are doing their best to feign interest, we have to give them that. They’re disappointed that there are no whales or polar bears to look at.

We’re trying to remember which famous philosopher lived in a hut up a Norwegian fjord.

Not all the children on deck are our sons. The boat is full of beautiful, strapping Norwegian teens on a school trip. They’re all six foot tall with no sense of personal space. They make our sons look stunted and reserved. They keep asking our sons if they have any crisps. This has been going on for five days and everyone is getting sick of it.

‘Why are we here?’ our sons ask us.

‘Yes!’ we say, pointing to our sons with the chalk, like we’ve seen lecturers do in films. ‘That’s exactly the crux of it!’

‘No,’ our sons say. ‘Why are we here, on a boat, halfway up Norway? When we could be exactly just about anywhere else?’

We have no answer to that one.

In the evenings everyone eats together in the dining hall and then the older sons sneak off to try to get a glimpse of the beautiful Norwegian teen girls and boys who gather at the back of the boat singing folk songs and playing acoustic guitars. We put the younger sons to bed and tell them about Descartes and Spinoza, try to pretend we don’t wish we were still teenagers.

Then we sit up long into the night nursing our glasses of aquavit and listening to the distant music and laughter.

We came to Norway in the hope of seeing the aurora borealis, but it’s summer and the sun never sets.