When I read my first essay to my philosophy tutor I was, quite naturally, utterly terrified. Not that I seriously mistrusted my abilities. The instructions had been clear and simple and I had taken pains to follow them as best I could.

I was to give an account of what philosophy was, and how it had been practised over the centuries. I understood perfectly well why my tutor might want me to provide an overview of the subject. I would be able to put my ideas in order, imperfect as they might be at this stage, in both the theory and the history of the subject; and he would immediately see where my limitations lay. I worked quite hard at it, but I was still terrified.

My tutor was a shy gruff man, of slightly military bearing, wearing rumpled tweeds. He fiddled with his pipe, holding it by the bowl, so that the stem as he twirled it seemed to point to various objects in the room in turn, as if in demonstration of something. Eventually the stem settled, pointing directly at me. He reached into his pocket for his tobacco pouch and began to fill the pipe with his thumb. He gave a little cough.

“Proceed,” he said.

I ventured a little smile at him, and began to read.

“The study of philosophy—,” I began, hoping that my opening sentence about a love of wisdom being entirely natural to an intelligent species, and a search for the truth acknowledged to be the particular province of the wise, would impress him just a little. The idea behind it was rather obvious, perhaps, but the expression had a certain grand sweep, I thought, appropriate to the occasion. My voice rang out.

However, he had interrupted me.

“Stop there, for a moment,” he said, with another little cough.

I stopped, of course, and looked at him expectantly. His pipe was filled to his satisfaction, the bowl tamped down, and he began to light it.

“That first word there,” he said. “What do you mean by it?”

Ah, I thought, the desire of philosophers for clarity and accuracy. I should have expected it.

“Well,” I said, conquering my nerves with what felt to me like a heroic burst of confidence, “I suppose that by ‘study’ I don’t really mean an examination of the subject of the kind that I am doing, but the activity itself. Sorry. I really just meant ‘philosophy’, didn’t I?”

My tutor was now sucking at his pipe vigorously so that great gales of flame were drawn from his match into the bowl.

“Stop, stop,” he said through the smoke. “I asked you about the first word, not the second.”

I looked down again at my essay, puzzled. The first sentence now cringed before me, like a whipped dog: “The study of philosophy could be said to be the most exalted of all man’s multifarious exploits.” Having been so sharply stopped in my tracks, I now didn’t think much of the sentence at all. It wasn’t quite the grand construction it had seemed at 1.00 am.

I could see very well that “exalted” was a somewhat clichéd expression, and there was something wrong with “multifarious” as well, wasn’t there? It was an obscure and pretentious word, in fact, much too close to “nefarious” for comfort. And I had already apologised for “study”, which wasn’t what I meant. No, the sentence wouldn’t do, after all. But what did he mean, the first word?

“’The’,” he barked at me. “That was your first word, wasn’t it? It was what I clearly heard you say.”

“’The’,” I agreed weakly, wondering what he might say next.

“Hearing you say something,” he said, waving his pipe about in a circular motion, “is not the same thing as knowing what you mean by it.”

“I suppose not,” I replied.

There was a long silence.

“And indeed,” he coughed, “your own saying something is not the same thing as you yourself knowing what you mean by it.”

There was another long silence.

“Tell me, then,” he said, what you intend to mean by ‘the’.”

Silence. I was flummoxed.

“I’m not sure that I intended anything,” I replied. “In particular.”

“Ah,” said my tutor. “In particular. But did you perhaps then intend something in general?”

Silence again.

“Perhaps,” I murmured eventually.

“Perhaps?” boomed my tutor. “Well, then. Is this study of yours a general thing rather than a particular thing? Is it a thing at all?”

I couldn’t help smiling at this, and began to feel that I might cope with his questioning with some simple common sense of the kind that Alice used in Wonderland.

“Well,” I said. “You can’t touch it.”

“Can you touch the air in this room?”

I looked at my tutor through the dense smoke that now surrounded him.

“Not really,” I mumbled.

“Not really,” he repeated. “Do you mean that you can only touch it in some hypothetical or imaginary way?”

“No.”

“So what you might be meaning to say is that though your finger may be in contact with it, you can’t feel it.”

“I suppose so.”

“What difference would it make, do you think, if you had begun by saying ‘A study of philosophy, etcetera’?”

“Not much,” I confessed.

“Not much!” thundered my tutor. “Don’t you see that we are back to hypotheticals again? ‘A study’ might exist or not exist. It might never happen. ‘The study tells you that it does exist, and that you presume that I know it exists.”

“Well, I would think that, I imagine, yes,” I stuttered.

Long silence. Long ruminative sucking on the pipe.

“If it exists, it is a thing, yes?”

“Yes.”

“What is the opposite of a thing?’

Another tortured silence.

“Nothing?” I ventured at last.

My tutor gave a loud laugh at this, and got up and looked out of the window. I could see beyond him into the Grove, where several deer were grazing and twitching their tails. I think I would have given anything to have been at that moment turned into a deer and allowed to stray among the clumps of grass and decaying elm trunks. Who was it who was turned into a deer? Actaeon? I surprised myself at knowing this, but then reflected that it was of course classics that had set me on the path to philosophy. If I was going to ask to change subjects in order to escape this mad tutor I didn’t have many options.

My tutor turned round abruptly and gestured at me with his pipe.

“Time’s up,” he said. “Off you go.”

I gratefully gathered my things together and began to leave the room. He called after me.

“You’ll do,” he said. “And don’t forget to read that Kant. It’s on the list I gave you. Yes, the list. That list. The list we both know about. That thing. I hope you’ve at least touched it.”

John Fuller is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic who has published over 50 books. He has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Epistles to Several Persons (1973), the Southern Arts Literature Prize for The Illusionists (1980), and the Forward Poetry Prize for Stones and Fires (1996). He was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award for The Space of Joy (2006). He also won the 2006 Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. His first novel, Flying to Nowhere (1983), won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.