I don’t mean to suggest that doing your utmost to foster a culture it would be good to grow up in is the rational choice in the game-theory sense; the expected probability of success is far too low for that. Nor would I see it merely as a moral obligation that you incur when you bring children into existence. It’s more direct than that. When you look down at your wide-eyed little one squirming in your arms and your mind turns to the idea of her doing the same with her own little one, the generations coming and going like leaves on a tree, striving to improve society seems no more optional than changing a diaper in the middle of the night—to be vulnerable to the fate of your child just is to be vulnerable to the fate of your society. The only real question is how to help.

At the heart of Claire Denis’s 2018 film High Life is the bond between a parent and child. Monte, played by Robert Pattinson, is the parent. When he was a boy, he killed a friend of his and is now, as the film opens, serving a life sentence. Rather than living out his days in a cell, however, Monte is voyaging toward a black hole in an artless, boxy spaceship as part of a governmental bargain: volunteer your life for an energy-source search and you won’t spend the rest of your life on death row.

Despite Monte’s refusal to use “The Box,” a room on the ship designed for sexual release, and apart from his consent or even awareness, he ends up fathering a daughter through the artificial interventions of the ship’s doctor. As the film opens, we watch Monte, with no detectable joy on his face, though not without tenderness, hold his tiny daughter’s hand and coax her into her first erratic steps. We watch as he tries in vain to mend a piece of the ship’s exterior while communicating with his daughter through his headset. She sits in a makeshift playpen, cooing and crying, as her father’s voice crackles through the computer positioned just out of her reach. The camera lingers lovingly on her chubby forearms, the bulge that bunches around her wrists, her delicate fingers. Her skin is bathed in amber light, in disquieting contrast to the dark emptiness outside the ship’s windows.

With unsettling force, these scenes insist that we not forget what having children has ultimately always been about: the quest to stave off death, to make a bid, however improbable, for the story of which we’re a part to have a future. Watching a baby defy the odds by hurtling through space in a sci-fi horror movie is a thinly disguised parable for our own condition, if we have eyes to see it.

[...] One reason you end up becoming deeply invested in your child’s potential is that parenting forces you to recognize your own limitations as a human being.

“Then just play the song, and I won’t be mean.” I knew I was in the wrong now, but I couldn’t bring myself back into the right. I had too much momentum.

“I don’t wanna play the song.”

“JUST PLAY IT!” I saw Julian’s face crumple first, his chin wrinkle, before I heard how my voice sounded: growly, dark and aggressive, like a comic-book villain’s.

And then Julian played, crying the entire time, carefully finding all the right notes. It’s hard to describe how it feels to make your own kid cry, how everything inside goes a little haywire. At that point, I should have hugged and reassured him, but I was still shaking with rage—not directed at him anymore, but it didn’t matter. It had become clear to me that I was a shitty dad and couldn’t pretend to be a good dad even if Julian needed me to.

“Good,” I said, rising from my seat. “You’re done. You can go play with your toys.”

Julian was still crying as I walked away. I climbed into my unmade bed thinking to myself: I hate this. I hate being a parent. I hate everything about it. I could hear Julian sniffling. He played with his truck for a few seconds. Then he came into the bedroom. It was too soon. I needed an hour, or maybe a year, to recover. He climbed on top of me. I just wanted to lie under the blanket and feel like shit indefinitely. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get away from him.

“Why? Why? Why?” your child asks, and you don’t know the answer. Your task as a parent is to keep human life going a little longer, but sometimes you find yourself wondering, what’s so great about human life? Why do we need more of it? Raising kids makes this feeling more acute. Not just because you’re at the point where most of the exciting things you once imagined the future had in store for you—oh, the places you’ll go, etc.—are either in the past or never happened at all. But also because as a parent you are thrown daily into a state of mere being, of existing for hours at a time devoid of any goals other than passing the time. Look at the vacant expression of a typical parent at a playground following their kids up and down the ramps and ladders of the jungle gym. This is life absent a higher purpose or plot, aimed only at perpetuating itself. You could say parents are like Sisyphus, except their role is less heroic. Replace his mountain with a mini-slide, his rock with a rubber ball, and the parent is the one who has to stand nearby and make sure he doesn’t break his neck so he can keep bringing the ball back to the top of the slide and watching it roll down over and over again.

But what is it that makes something worth doing? In a lecture delivered in 1900, meekly titled “What Makes a Life Significant?,” William James tries to find the line between ennobling, purposeful activity and its enervating opposite. He has just spent a week at Chautauqua—a kind of fin-de-siècle TED-talk vacation colony—and is left sickened by the buffet of intellectual delicacies on offer. His internal pendulum swings hard to the opposite extreme: under the sign of Tolstoy in his peasant phase, he tries on a sort of worker-worship, a hallowing of all that’s rough and rugged. But soon this too fails him, as he is unable to ignore the fact that most of the workers around him seem more or less miserable, degraded, directionless. “If it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books,” he writes, “it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.”

Characteristically, James tries to split the difference. Meaning, he proposes, must be a product of two factors: effort and ideal. Heavy toil without some explanatory framework is misery, but so is a life of ease and intellectual thrill without struggle. It’s their combination that produces stable purpose: a struggle against some worldly resistance, for some socially shared goal. Both the content of the activity and the way it’s understood in the culture, the what and the why, matter. “Ideal aspirations are not enough,” he writes, “when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.”

Objectively and thoroughly significant! In Graeber’s story, the sort of work that meets James’s requirements is precisely what’s cut out of the present arrangement. It’s the hole at the center of the wheel. Hard but necessary labor (like cleaning) lacks the valorization and rewards that might make it bearable, while the sorts of large-scale undertakings which by their nature combine effort and ideal—projects aimed at reducing general suffering, like building affordable housing, adequately staffing schools or greening the power grid—are not being done, or only in small defensive formations. Between James and Graeber, we get an image not only of a busted material economy, but of an economy of meaning that’s weirdly warped as well: a wide base of important jobs denied social recognition, a thick middle of pointless or destructive feudal make-work, and a little penthouse on top full of tenured professors, superstar artists and NGO executives, the one-percenters of purpose, munching hors d’oeuvres and talking in hushed voices about the dire state of the world.

Beauty, like love, requires effort. When I think of “difficult” art—art that requires work to appreciate and understand—I think of the two maddening weeks I spent reading Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, unable to make sense of his syntax, crashing against unyielding paragraphs, making out the irrepressible Kate Croy and the doomed heiress Milly Theale like rouge-streaked shadows in a silver mirror. But difficulty is not reserved to high culture or to modernism. Outside the window to my left is a slim gray tree, about twenty feet tall, its delicate branches curving in all directions. How long would I have to stare at this tree to take in the full measure of its beauty? Thirty seconds? Two hours? One premise of aesthetic education is that deepening our sensitivity to art and beauty demands the deliberate application of attention. Lest we turn out like Oblomov, the winning yet incurably lazy hero of Ivan Goncharov’s classic nineteenth-century novel, who lives in rooms strewn with books he never finishes.

Beauty brings us to a halt: it imposes, if only for a flash, the cessation of activity. (On the lawn in front of the library, seeing a runner in red shorts complete the last flailing strides of a sprint before pitching forward, his fingers caressing soft dirt: I let my book fall.) [...]

In high school I was learning how to read for symbols in addition to surfaces, and I read Lolita as a symbol for the things we love but cannot keep. I was old enough to know, if not accept, that my hormone-fueled infatuation would dim, just as Lolita’s charms fade into a banal adulthood. (She looks “pale and polluted” when Humbert sees her last.) “Lolita has to be impossibly young,” writes Elif Batuman in the London Review of Books, “because the brevity of youth is a metonym for the brevity of life, and the monstrousness of Humbert’s passion is the monstrousness of facelifts, or of Lenin’s tomb, or of the wedding cake in Great Expectations.” A passion for youth is a passion for what is at every moment in the process of decline. Lolita, then, is not only about the irretrievability of innocence but about the doomed structure of desire itself. Desire, like youth, is endangered by its very continuation. To try to remain young is to grow old. To want all the way to the culmination of consummation is to stop wanting. Orgasm = death. What romance doesn’t come to seem “pale and polluted” in the aftermath?

Watching denizens of the #MeToo movement squint so suspiciously at a book I have found so beautiful in so many ways, I can’t help but feel that we are depriving ourselves to no end. We, the survivors of male abusers and the victims of workplace harassment, are supposed to become gluttons for the additional punishment of excommunicating artworks bearing the slightest tint of taint. But what good is this festival of renunciation? It only broadens the scope of our already substantial losses.

[...]

This reading around, Lolita seemed to me to enact a fantasy of impossibly perfect curation, like Ingmar Bergman movies in which every scene is composed as exactly as a painting. Life could never look so good, which is why we need the movies. The point of erotica, at least to some extent, is that it is so radically unlike fumbling tongues in middle school or struggles with stubborn zippers. Books like Lolita and Story of O are fairy tales. In them, desire does not undo itself. Pain does not hurt. Youth does not age.