I met Noam Chomsky in my hometown Geneva, New York in the winter of 1981/82. I had come back from working on an archaeological survey in the Western Desert and my brother David had been killed driving down to visit me in New York where I was studying for my orals in Greek at Columbia. I was up in Geneva visiting my parents and I went across the street to Hobart to hear Noam Chomsky speak about the Israel Palestine situation in those days.

I met Chomsky at the reception and told him I’d taken a class in linguistics from an old student of his- a large man with shoulder length hair who said “The horse is speaking,” kept a monkey called nim chimsky, was trying to teach pigeons to talk, and gave us a homework assignment about bumping into someone on the sidewalk. I couldn’t make anything out of it. It was post-riot Columbia. I took refuge in the Classics Department, where I became a student of the papyrologist Roger Bagnall- who must have been around 25 at the time and only had two other students. We sat at a little table in the classics library reading Plato- Roger saying “Forget the grammar, we’re going straight to the text.” In those days of course we used to just memorize everything.

Chomsky surprised me by asking me to drive around New York State with him for a week, and i did. Chomsky was giving a series of lectures in Central Western New York that week in Syracuse and Rochester and Cornell and other places. We stayed in the homes of college faculty who graciously hosted us. I was a young student in the old model of learning, a student in the presence of a master, a brilliant living mind. The concept was one of absorption, of keeping a living tradition alive- and the tradition was one of questioning, pouring over the morning papers, watching the evening news.

“Morning star, evening star” Chomsky would say of this or that, “It’s the same thing.” I was reading Plato’s Meno at the time and had a copy of the Meno with me. The Meno starts out with the interlocutor saying that Socrates is like a ray hidden in the sand in the lip of the sea, with his flat ugly face and hidden sting. The word for ray was narc, hence narcotic- the numbness from the sting. I loved that tactile visual in the Greek. The Meno meant a lot to Chomsky because it is essentially an investigation through a probing dialogue about the geometrical underlay naturally present in the mind. Socrates leads an illiterate servant boy to solve a geometrical problem which he is already capable of doing by himself in the inherent nature of his own mind.

I thought of that week as a tutorial in Plato from Chomsky, who clearly saw himself as a Socrates figure- questioning Israel, probing the Jewish tradition and moral ground as his inherent duty as a Jewish intellectual, just as Socrates saw himself as a citizen of Athens, questioning the establishment there until he was arrested and given the option of exile or death. He chose death over exile from the community to which he had devoted his life.

The other book we talked about on that trip was the beautifully written study of the natural history of Siberia- Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, a treatise on anarchy that had been banned for most of the 20th Century. I got a copy when I was in Syracuse on the advice of Chomsky, who loved the book, and i later had it bound in green leather in Cairo, for I left after that week to go and live on the road, mostly in Africa, disappearing for almost two years. I took almost nothing with me, but had in my mind so much memorized poetry, and so many loved people, that I could pull it out and look at it in all its gorgeous detail and never missed the absence of the external material thing.