Alfred North Whitehead once referred to philosophy as “footnotes to Plato”. Perhaps he was being a little facetious – but only a little. The tradition of Western philosophy is heavily indebted to the Athenian for its tone, topics and aspirations of worldly importance. And perhaps most impressively, Plato seemed to do away with so much froth and chatter – his was a single-minded, uncluttered vision of the cosmos. After so many centuries, Plato remains the touchstone of Western intellectual endeavour: you are either for or against him – indifference is almost unphilosophical.

But Plato's high-minded decisiveness is deceptive. In many ways, he exemplified distraction. Despite his virtues, the brilliant Athenian noble was in flight from life's earthly limitations. His abstractions, his universals, his denial of sex and flesh all suggest a flinch – a retreat in the face of life's sacrifices and compromises. Unable or unwilling to accept the fraught conditions of workaday reality, he sought solace in imaginary perfection. He fantasized about the Forms, a realm without pain, decay and death. And there is, as Schiller maintained, nothing wrong with imagination. But Plato did not let dreams be dreams – he transformed his phantasm into a hard fact.

For most of his life, the novelist Henry James was of no fixed address. He wasn't sleeping rough – far from it. The cosmopolitan Yankee lived in comfortable rooms, houses and hotels, often with servants. And perhaps he dreamt occasionally of a home of his own. “I have felt the all but irresistible desire,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in Italy, “to put my hand on some modest pied-à-terre.” But, as this suggests, he was looking for temporary accommodation, a small flat for Italian sun and fresh air. This rootlessness was something of a family trait. His father Henry Sr was a restive intellectual who dragged his young family all over Europe and the United States (James described himself and siblings as “hotel children”). When he matured, Henry Jr wrote, toured and dined in France, Italy, Switzerland and Ireland.

Karl Marx was a curious mix of idler and workaholic. As we've seen, he was often distracted from his important work by petty disputes, domestic chaos and illness. If the portly, scruffy philosopher wasn't fidgeting or pacing, his fiery temperament led him astray. And when A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy didn't live up to Marx's hype, his easily diverted character was to blame: despite all his self-congratulation, he simply hadn't put the work in. “Alas,” said his friend Engels, “we are so used to these excuses for the non-completion of work!” Admittedly, it's hard to concentrate on the revolution when your arse boils are flaring up (“of all types of work,” said Marx in a letter to Engels, “theory is the most unsuitable if one has this devil's brew in one's blood”). Yet Marx's chaotic home, unpaid bills and life of impetuous feuds give the impression of a disorganized teenager in a man's shaggy body.

But appearances can be deceptive. Marx was a prodigious writer, speaker and teacher, as well as an international organizer for the communist cause.

I keenly remember the first time I was kicked in the head. It was an otherwise forgettable evening in karate class. We were sparring in jiyu kumite, or “free fighting”: no breaks, no points, just fighting with medium contact until the teacher yelled “yame” to stop. My opponent was a little older, stronger and more patient than I was. He was also a good tactician, with excellent flexibility and power in his legs. At one point, he kicked my face, but I blocked it. He immediately attacked my face and stomach with punches, which I scrambled to block. I forgot about the leg, but it never left the air – his knee just kept hanging there for a few seconds while he got my attention with his hands. Then thwack. His foot whacked me in the side of the temple. I backpedalled for a while, trying to regain my composure. Lucky he wasn't trying to really hurt me – he would have done some damage. We kept fighting until the sensei stopped us. As I knelt there sweating and smarting, I realized I had learned a valuable lesson: don't be so preoccupied with obvious threats that you miss the real dangers.

A few years ago, my wife and I enjoyed a long holiday in Greece. After the sweat and smog of ancient Athens, we took a ferry to the Ionian Islands, nestled off the west coast of Greece, not far from southern Italy. Our destination was the mythic island of Odysseus: Ithaca. Not many people know about Ithaca, perhaps because party isles like Santorini have given boozy Anglo-Saxon revellers all the sun and souvlaki they crave. Ithaca is beautiful, but not because of its nude beaches, cheap alcohol, or sunburnt Londoners. Instead, Ithaca weds the hardiness of scrubby olive groves and ancient stone walls to the delicate pinks and reds of wild cyclamen flowers and the quiet lapping of a turquoise sea. Half an hour's mad winding taxi-ride from end to end, the whole tiny island is as Homer wrote in The Odyssey: “a rugged land, too cramped for driving horses”.

On one beautiful autumn afternoon, my wife and I were taken by a friend to a little village in the mountains of Ithaca, called Exoghi. The village was strangely deserted, save for a few old women. Houses destroyed by an earthquake decades before still lay in ruins, and cats roamed.

When my son was a newborn, I often found it easy to soothe his crying. All I had to do was gently tap his back and say shhh into his ear. Without fail, he would begin to quieten down. His banshee cries would turn into tiny sobs and eventually he would fall asleep on my shoulder, a little snuggling bundle. At other times, I would sing to him in Arabic scales, with as much depth and vibrato as possible. He would immediately unball his fists, stop crying and stare at me with huge, unblinking blue eyes. The reason for this, I read, was that babies can only give their attention to a couple of things at once. If they are crying, they are crying. If they are listening to their father trying to sound like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, then that is their world. In other words, it is almost impossible for them to be in two minds about anything.

As babies get older, these limitations begin to subside. Children become capable of turning their attention to several things at once. Sometimes no amount of midnight singing can stop my toddler from a raging, nightmare-spawned scream.

“Buying books would be a good thing,” quipped Schopenhauer, “if one could also buy the time to read them in.” In this, the misanthropic German revealed the dilemma for all book lovers: so many books, so little time. According to the US trade magazine Publishers Weekly, a quarter of a million books are published annually in the United States alone. Once you allow for language, genre, taste and luck, it's still possible to be intrigued or provoked by hundreds of titles every year. And then there are all the old books: from ancient works of Greek philosophy, Roman drama or Japanese religion, to last year's missed blockbuster. Unlike films or paintings, these works can't be enjoyed in an hour. We have to devote days and weeks to them. (This was the rationale behind T. S. Eliot's terse defence of poetry in the modern age: “It takes up less space.”) Put simply, literature is yet another forum for distraction; a chance to be waylaid by less valuable pursuits.

With this in mind, I've written a few words on the more charming, profound or authoritative books and essays I've read for Distraction. Most titles are stocked in universities or public collections, but some are worth buying. A home library is a wonderful thing – it offers continuity, access and inspiration. Perhaps most importantly, it stands as an enduring emblem of our ambitions and experiences.

At first blush, it seems Henri Emile Benoit Matisse was the perfect bourgeois son: intelligent, well educated and a trained lawyer. Working in a provincial notary's office as a clerk in 1890, Matisse was all set for a stable and financially rewarding legal career. But he was bored stiff by law (“it was Hebrew to me”), and only persisted out of pragmatism and loyalty, and for want of anything else to do. He spent his days copying dry legal documents, and when boredom set in he entertained himself by shooting passers-by with putty pellets from a glass peashooter.

This juvenile dissent would be an unremarkable fact in the history of law if it weren't for what followed. Not long into his appointment, the young man was struck with a severe hernia (or something like it – Matisse's diagnoses changed as he aged). Bedridden in hospital, Matisse was unable to work, or even to walk. It was assumed that he would recover, continue his apprenticeship and graduate to a higher office. But radical, life-altering change came from an unlikely quarter. His mother, Anna Héloise, gave him some paints, brushes and canvases, hoping to take his mind off his convalescence.