Putting a price on a flat-screen TV or a toaster is, he says, quite sensible. ‘But how to value pregnancy, procreation, our bodies, human dignity, the value and meaning of teaching and learning – we do need to reason about the value of goods. The markets give us no framework for having that conversation. And we’re tempted to avoid that conversation, because we know we will disagree about how to value bodies, or pregnancy, or sex, or education, or military service; we know we will disagree. So letting markets decide seems to be a non-judgmental, neutral way. And that’s the deepest part of the allure; that it seems to provide a value-neutral, non-judgmental way of determining the value of all goods. But the folly of that promise is – though it may be true enough for toasters and flat-screen televisions – it’s not true for kidneys.’

For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitudes, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home: to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.

One day, I was in a tram entertaining the prolonged fastness of the traffic with the reading of Blass’ book on the philosophy of the gospels. A friend of mine, that happened to enter, passed a very Portugese comment as to the nature of my entertainment. It seemed to him absurd that I, with hardly any knowledge of Greek, and none at all of Hebrew, should be worried about the details debated on the Christian texts. I did not explain, because these things can never be explained. My critic could not understand that the text of the gospels is a reality of the Earth, like light and flowers are, and that I would be of a barbarian sectarianism if I were interested in carnations and magnolias without being also interested in St. Matthew’s doxology.

Overeducation” is something Woody Allen seems to discern more often than the rest of us might. “I know so many people who are well-educated and super-educated,” he told an interviewer for Time recently. “Their common problem is that they have no understanding and no wisdom; without that, their education can only take them so far.” In other words they have problems with their “relationships,” they have failed to “work through” the material of their lives with a trained evaluator, they have yet to perfect the quality of their emotional consumption. Wisdom is hard to find. Happiness takes research. The message that large numbers of people are getting from Manhattan and Interiors and Annie Hall is that this kind of emotional shopping around is the proper business of life’s better students, that adolescence can now extend to middle age.

‘The number of themes, of words, of texts, is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone,’ he said to me once when he was talking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

A silent hotel stands at Al Qrnah, a blind sentinel overlooking the Shatt Al Arab, the channel bearing the rivers out by the oilfields of Kuwait into the Persian Gulf. Teenagers cast for fish here, while in the yard of the empty hotel, children swing from the sapless branches of what is supposed to be the Tree of Knowledge.