Belgrade

The Balkan capital where Thomas Nagel was born in 1937, not long before his family emigrated to the United States: he would grow up to ask what it is like to be a bat, and to insist that some questions about experience resist every objective answer.

Belgrade sits where the Sava meets the Danube and has been fought over about as often as any city in Europe. Nagel was born there in 1937 to Jewish parents who left for the United States the following year, which was very nearly too late. He has said little about it publicly. His career has been spent insisting that some things are available only from the inside, and that an account of the world leaving out what experience is like has left something out.