I so admire Richard Wollheim's memoir of his childhood, Germs, that it feels like a book written for me. I mean that in two ways. I mean both that I felt, while reading Germs, as if I were Richard Wollheim's ideal reader but also, and more remarkably, as if he were speaking directly to me. I was engaged, in other words, as a reader (an admirer of Wollheim's exquisite style) and as a human being, one who has experienced some of the terrors, sadness and beauty Wollheim captures.

Where to begin? Germs is the memoir of a childhood in London, England, in the 1920s and '30s. Though Wollheim -- better known as a philosopher whose specialties were art and psychoanalysis -- refers to his adulthood on occasion, he uses "childhood" as the circumference of his book. Germs is divided into three sections: My Land, My Families and Love and Fear. And it was written over a period of 20 years. I imagine, then, that these three sections represent three efforts to capture a childhood.

The first section, My Land, was, for me, the most beautifully observed and the most difficult to follow. Wollheim writes: "Everything I have lived through has been completely forgotten or as if it were yesterday. There is no blue to the horizon of Time." Effectively, then, My Land goes from vivid moment to vivid moment. Its logic is that of poetic progression, not narrative, and its subject is the child's body and its immediate surroundings.

My Families, the next section, is more traditional. Having established his own personality (he is a melancholy, inquisitive and odd child), Wollheim tells the story of his family. In particular, his father's European-Jewish origins clearly fascinate him. And why not? His father's family is deeply talented, slightly shady, legendarily ugly, and their stories make for very interesting reading. In this section, we learn more about Wollheim's impresario father (was he "romantically" involved with Sergei Diaghilev?) and his mother (who had been an actress), but . . . both of them remain slightly mysterious and distant, because part of Wollheim's project is to recapture the state of ignorance that is particular to childhood. After stressing that "grown-up ignorance is not the equivalent of childish ignorance," he writes, "everything I do know now I know by chance." And this knowing by chance, knowing because one overheard something on a staircase, say, is exactly the feeling My Families evokes. It is the feeling that something darkly mysterious lurks behind the various facades we create for our comfort.

The final section, Love and Fear, is the most easily read. It deals with the advent of sexuality, with young Wollheim's fear of women, which becomes a kind of awe. Here we learn how he lost his virginity. We read his childish speculations on the difference between men and women, and we see his first steps as an intellectual, reading and thinking, in love with order and Art. This Wollheim is agreeable company, a pleasant companion, almost an intimate. And he ends this section (and Germs) by detailing the various ways by which a childhood ends.

The description I've given of the various parts of Germs doesn't convey two of the most attractive aspects of the book: Wollheim's great, dry wit and his literary innovation. Germs is often very amusing, earnest in its absurdities (Wollheim strives heroically to explain his lifelong dread of newspapers, for instance) and, ultimately, filled with wonder. People, places, plants and animals are given their due, and Wollheim manages to be both caustic about and forgiving of his younger self. In fact, it may well be that the deepest goal of Germs, as he himself hints, is to convey why the things that are important to him are important, why the particular (the child) is still so vital to the adult he has become.

Richard Wollheim, who died in 2003, wrote principally on Freud (from a philosophical perspective) and on aesthetics. He is also the author of a book called On the Emotions. In it, he makes the useful, though perhaps untenable, distinction between mental states (inner weather, transient feelings, hunger, thirst etc.) and mental dispositions (systems of beliefs, memories, things that are more persistent in the mind). One of Germs' accomplishments is that it is something of a chronicle of how transient things (a fall, the sight of women kissing a photograph, the sound of bees above a lavender bush) become aspects of a "disposition." We are, in the end, made of small moments that solidify within us, moments that are the building blocks of our dispositions.

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