I cannot recall how much I knew at this time about Raimond Gaita's childhood and teenage years. I knew that his mother had died and that before her death she had been greatly troubled and that he had grown up largely without her. I knew that he had a great protector in Melbourne, a friend of his father, whom he called simply Hora and always spoke of with greatest warmth. Above all I knew that his deepest connection was with his father -- a man whom I knew of chiefly at the time through the 100% proof plum brandy Rai would bring back proudly after visits to Maryborough.

Since reading Romulus, My Father I have thought back on these days. I am struck now by how high-spirited Rai was, how alive to the world, and how free from self-pity, despite having passed through experiences -- many of which I learnt about for the first time in this book -- which would have numbed or embittered many others. I am certain that these are the qualities -- the radical absence of self-pity, the aliveness to the world -- which will first strike many readers of Romulus, My Father. Some things about it are less self-evident. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that this is a book of filial love and tribute, not a work of philosophy. But because it is written by Raimond Gaita, and because he is who he is, it is also marked by the conceptual clarity and moral depth that so distinguishes his philosophical writing. Rai has no intention other than to tell the story of his father's life. But in its truthful telling, the nature of friendship; the terrors of madness; the relationship between work and the moral order; the poverty of a prudentialist ethic that would tell us to be honest because it pays; above all what the love between man and woman and between father and son might mean -- are revealed as lucidly as in any book I have read. There were many passages I was tempted to read to show the luminous quality of the writing and the supple movement in it between memory and reflection, the particular and the universal. Because a love of animals was so central to Romulus' life and because the telling of this part of the story is so charming, in the end I chose the following reflection:

My father's behaviour to his animals struck some people as sentimental. Some said he treated his dogs as though they were human beings. They were quite wrong, for his practice always expressed a wisely judged sense of the radical difference in kind between human beings and animals, even though he sometimes blurred that distinction in conversation. When his dogs died, he was heartbroken and cried. He told me that sometimes the pain in his chest lasted for weeks and tears would catch him without warning. Even so, he merely buried them in a hole in the backyard and would have thought it absurd to observe any of the rituals we think appropriate when human beings die. Sometimes, to explain his generous treatment of his dogs, he would say that if dogs go to heaven, and he met them there, he hoped that they would say he treated them well. I always thought that to be a beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed.

Our age is haunted by the threat of a collapse into meaninglessness and by what the novelist, Kundera, calls the unbearable lightness of being. There is no lightness of being in Romulus, My Father.