There are 16 chairs in the one-room apartment I share with my girlfriend, and 18 if you count the tiny ones my young daughters favor when drawing at the coffee table. We also have a love seat and an enormous sectional sofa — a crazy amount of seating for an abode with only one private space, the bathroom (just one seat in there, and it’s porcelain). Jessica, my girlfriend, jokingly calls our apartment “the chair emporium.”

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., our house was raucous. My well-read Scottish father and witty American mother, a part-time philosophy professor, hosted roaring dinners at least once a week. I was the youngest of four, and swarms of cousins and neighborhood children came around almost daily.

One of my earliest memories is of crawling under the dining table during one of my parents’ parties, tracing the knuckles on the table’s ball-and-claw feet, and then turning to see all the people’s feet, as if I were surrounded by a shoe rack.

People stayed late, drinking and smoking, huddled in conversations about history, poetry and art, or braying politics across the room. Under the table, it was like a tent. I didn’t get any of their jokes or their sidebars about Proust or Reagan, but I had a sense that these were people who knew things, and they delighted in letting their knowledge run free.