“So how does it feel to be a human being now?” That wasn’t the question I expected to get from my aunt, the first time I saw her after my oldest kid was born. For starters she was a feminist, a prominent academic1 with several books to her name, and somebody who’d always struck me as mercilessly unsentimental. “Do you get it now?” she pressed on. “Before this your life was in shadow, it was fake. Now you’re in the sunlight, now it means something.”
She had kids, so despite having some ideological resistance to getting it, she got it. I got it too. It’s hard to describe what “it” is if you haven’t gotten it, but I’ll try to explain. The moment I first held my child, I had a vision of every human being who had ever done the same. I stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot while before my eyes a whole field of ancestors stretched back into the forgotten past, each cradling a baby just like I was doing. What was I without them? Nothing at all. A cosmic joke, a fluke, or a random collection of atoms. But with them, I was one stage of a process, a chapter of a story.
And not only that, but I was also no longer alone. It had always seemed to me that the problem of intersubjectivity could never be conquered, that between minds there yawned an unbridgeable epistemic chasm. Yet here was an experience that I shared with countless others from the most varied places and times, an experience I shared with emperors and with slaves. André Maurois once said: “Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold”. I had always thought he meant this in a practical, or perhaps an emotional sense, but I now realized it was even truer cosmically. I had, as my aunt said, become a human being.
I didn’t just see the past. In that moment, the future also resolved itself into dreadful clarity. I had always known intellectually that someday I would die, and that the world would continue mostly as it had, but I never really believed it. Anything beyond the horizon delimited by my lifetime had been hazy and indistinct. Not anymore. Now I regarded the newborn squirming in my arms, and knew with absolute certainty that if things went well this child would bury me, and then continue living. Suddenly the far-future mattered, I had skin in the game now. I was no longer a temporal provincial, past and future both had an immediate and urgent reality, and I knew that I would never think the same way about them again.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Children of Men by P.D. James”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-17.
1. This was in the days before cancellation, I’ve often wondered since then whether she would have allowed herself to think the thought today.
2. It also caused me to wonder whether people without living descendants should be permitted any political representation at all.
March 29, 2025
QotD: Becoming a human being
Comments Off on QotD: Becoming a human being
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
