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In my young adulthood — of course, of course — he knew nothing, or nothing of use. His views were old-fashioned, I had learnt in my twenties; to learn from him was, among other things difficult for me, to subjugate myself. I had needed to topple the statue, find the fault, see the feet of clay. I had separated my sense of myself as a writer from his teaching, his world view.

But he was now 80; and I was 40; and, for many reasons, I knew I had taken a wrong turn.

LESSON ONE, he said, was about how you have to start with a healthy respect for silence.

“First, just be still; listen,” he said. “Matthew Arnold speaks of the leisure to grow wise. I would extrapolate from that ‘the silence to be attentive’. It is a disaster that we are losing the option of silence — with all these televisions, all these channels, these devices you carry that constantly interrupt you.”

With every weekend that I spent wrapped up, sitting in a rattan chair in the corner of the old sun porch, listening to nothing but the wind toss the trees, after working on the renovation of the old house, I realised I had lost contact with part of myself.

My father had raised me to honour the power of the imagination above all. Once, when I was about eight, he had held up a polished slice of whitish-cream agate, the kind you could buy for 50 cents in tourist shops. The outside of the circle of agate was rough, and the interior layers were swirling, alternately translucent and opaque. Against the bulb of a table lamp a world lit up within it.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I see a . . . an ocean,” I said.

“I see a cityscape, with a set of towers,” he said. “Van Gogh painted like this.”

Then he showed me a reproduction of Starry Night and some prints of Van Gogh’s provincial cityscapes. I could see the swirls that nature had crafted in the slice of agate echoed in the technique of the artist’s paintbrush.

More than a decade later, in college, I dated a Marxist whom I will call James. At that time I still fully embraced poetry. I was reading and writing it and, like so many undergraduates, deeply believed in its magic. James, a graduate student, was the first person I met who rejected all of that in favour of historical materialism — the belief that nothing was real but politics; the rest was bourgeois affectation. God, verse, romance, beauty: all seduced one away from the hard work of analysing who has material power and who suffers.

James’s approach fascinated me, but its starkness also horrified me, and I wrote a love poem arguing with him about it, in which that agate surfaced again: