are tomatoes red?

in memory of John Heil

This is the seventeenth in my series of short, quickly written, philosophy essays. I wrote it just over a week ago.

Many of the reasons I love America track the fact that I came here every year when I was a kid, from the age of six. These trips were some of the happiest times of my extremely happy childhood. And I can see now how formative these trips were for me, in so many ways.

The two things we would always do on these trips to America were visit our relatives in Tennessee, who lived in a big wooden house partway up a mountain on the edge of a lake, and visit our friends the Heils in Davidson, an idyllic university town of ice cream and hot dogs and books in North Carolina.

I am writing this from Tennessee, where I’m on holiday for the weekend, having recently realised that I now live under two hours from Nashville by plane! The first time I came to America, I was so excited in large part because I had never been on a plane before, and we were taking four to get to our first destination. We flew from Newcastle to Amsterdam to DC to Baltimore to Charlotte — a route that now seems insane to me, though GPT does a good job of explaining it.

I am writing this in Tennessee, thinking of John Heil of the Davidson Heils, who we visited each year — John Heil, who died this week. John was my dad’s best friend. Like my dad, he was one of the best philosophers in the world. And like my dad, he was one of the smartest and funniest and kindest people I’ve been lucky to know. When my dad died in 2014, I was extremely sad. Reading philosophy books was pretty much the only thing that helped. I was also extremely busy, in the middle of doing the crazy thing of running for parliament back in my hometown. Then John came to visit.

He came to visit for a term at the local university — a visit he had planned in order to spend time talking with my dad. Instead, he ended up talking with me. Sure, there were other philosophers around, and I went to hear him give papers to them. But John talked with me about whether tomatoes are red, and all the other important philosophical things, over lunches at the Almshouses. And in many other places, over those months and since. Most recently, in St Louis, at a baseball game. Each springtime, over drinks at the Dun Cow, with his wife Harrison and my mum. I wish I were there now, with these people I love.

John was the closest thing to having my dad back, not least because he knew my dad’s work so well. He even read a late draft of the 95,000 words of my PhD thesis — something I would never have asked of anyone else except my dad. But John was also very much, in himself, one of my favourite people.

It’s hard, when you’re writing about someone who has recently died, not to make it all about you. It’s hard when you’re so grateful for the friendship you shared. When you come to realise that so many of the things you love about your life — my life, in America, as a philosopher! — are things that you have come to love thanks to the friend you had.

There will be a great deal written about John Heil qua philosopher. You can read some of the things I’ve written on this substack about his work, and I will write more. But for now, here in Tennessee, what I want to say is very simple. I miss my friend and I am so grateful for him.

John Heil chopping tomatoes in Durham.