that you are doing a good thing, and that it might mean something to be doing it. And it can’t be ruled out, even at this late stage, that you are not wrong to believe these things.
Because the truth is that, for me, the experience of parenthood has meant a radically increased stake in the future. It’s not simply that I care about the world in a way I somehow didn’t before I had children, but rather that the future has become a realer and more intimate presence in my life, something in relation to which I no longer feel inclined to take abstract positions. I no longer feel the definitive force of pessimism as a philosophy. Statements of hopelessness, no matter how elegantly formulated, no longer sound quite the same tone of authority and wisdom. Which is not to say that I have become an optimist, or anything even close, but simply that life no longer seems to afford me the luxury of submitting to the comfort of despair.
“Optimism and pessimism,” wrote Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “are so much sticking plaster for fortune-tellers and the writers of leading articles. The pictures of the future that humanity draws for itself, both positive and negative utopias, have never been unambiguous.”
At time of writing, my daughter is almost nine months old. It would be true to say that when I think about her future—by which I mean the future—I feel a swelling tide of anxiety within me, that I observe a looping psychic montage of melting ice caps, extreme weather events, fires, droughts, floods, resource wars. I hold her, and look down at the soft indented area at the crown of her head, the fontanel, and see that it is pulsing, and feel suddenly overwhelmed by her fragility, her openness to the world and all its potential harms.
But it would also be true, and maybe even truer, to say that her existence has deepened my investment in the world, my sense of the ever-present possibility of joy, of the future as a fertile realm of possibility, of life.
The thing that goes straight to my heart is how thrilled she clearly is to be alive, this child. She is a tiny engine of joy: the word that comes most readily to mind when I think of her, this beloved and entirely mysterious person, is refulgence.
There are songs we sing to her, goofy little ad hoc compositions that have become part of the evolving cultural canon of our family. She knows these songs are about her, because their lyrics are mostly just variations on the theme of her name, and when we sing them she gets so happy that we sometimes worry she might be in some kind of physical danger, that her system might be in some obscure but very real way risking overload. When her brother sings to her, she literally vibrates with joy, with an excess of vital energies, as though in the grip of some sacred ecstasy, ancient and impenetrable. Her chubby little fists clutch the air rhythmically, grasping more of the world, more of what she’s feeling, more of us. Her mother, her father, her brother.
There are times when I forget that I’m supposed to be thinking about the end of days, that I’m supposed to be channeling the apocalyptic energies of our time, metabolizing the unease, the fleeting visions of disintegration and dissolution. There are times when I live only in the present, and it is a good place for the time being.
One evening, toward the end of the weird dry summer of 2018, we were driving home after a visit to my wife’s parents. There was very little traffic, and the children were quiet in the back of the car. Our son was playing with a Ninja Turtle, stretching its rubbery arms as far as they would go, sustaining as he played a happy stream of self-contained chatter, half-lucid trash talk, threats, and counter-threats. His sister was asleep beside him. At some point, I became aware that he had stopped talking, that he was being unusually quiet. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he was gazing out the window.
“Look at the sky,” he said.
The air was illuminated by the setting sun, by a lurid spillage of purples and pinks and oranges, spreading and deepening. It was one of those spectacles only nature could have successfully pulled off. If anyone else had tried it, it would have looked garish and tasteless. By rights it