A genius who has learned the hard way to hide his light under a bushel in postmodern New York City, Philip is a young protagonist with a soul from a bygone era. Slowly revealing himself in the stream-of-consciousness narrative to be a superb Classicist and a lover of his people despite themselves, Philip retains his public persona of ladies' man and affably laid-back colleague for as long as he humanly can, no doubt as much out of old-fashioned courtesy and consideration as to keep the trauma of the Untergang des Abendlandes from messily breaking surface in his own inner dramaturgy.

Catalyzed, with a certain inevitability, by a contemporary corporate policy initiative with which a man of his caliber simply cannot pretend to make do, Philip takes leave of the last vestiges of materialism in his life, save his tailoring, and stoically and awkwardly strikes out into the discombobulating jungle of the space that was once America. Concentrating on an ever-narrowing circle of his own kind, among whom he seeks still to champion manful virtue and female honor in the understated ancestral manner, Philip simplifies and refines himself in mind until he reaches a singularity of sorts.