by
Jon Baskin
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[...] I take to cocktails. These seem the most efficient self-care practice, at least until I switch to just whiskey (better value for money). After my seventh night in a row blacking out, I go to campus counseling.
I sit there in the office, filling out forms. I do not know what to do, how to be, here. I know only that I am anxious and do not know why. The therapist I am assigned tells me I have to take it slow, go easy on myself. One step at a time. Even if it’s something as small as getting up and moving your dishes from your desk to the sink, she says. That’s a feat too.
I take a deep breath and imagine getting up, just to move my dishes from my desk to the sink: just a minute, and then it will be over. I can do this, I think, and it will be a feat, an action of worth.
But I am not convinced that it should be—I am not convinced that getting out of bed should be a job I can say I accomplished, that going easy on myself is the best advice. Focusing on my own feelings about my life—the endless anxieties and provocations from the world—rather than about other things, seems to be distracting me, making me lose my ability to prioritize at all. I feel further than ever from being better.
If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play.
from the ethics of ambiguity. relevant to N
I want to look, really look, at the world—but I find I do not want to look at it as an explanation for what is wrong with me. I don’t want to be forgiven. I want unkindness, from myself and from the world, because it is unkindness that has to be reckoned with, that makes me feel awake. I want to be punished; I want the stimulation of struggle. But it seems in order to do this I have to consider that the world does not owe me anything. I want to look at the world because despite the fact that it is unkind, it is also interesting, and full, and endlessly entertaining.
I forget this, during my worst winter and my most unmotivated months; I forget that there are stories to be chased that have nothing to do with me. I ask my therapist to help me remember these stories, these reasons to get out of bed in the morning. I ask her to help me re-want to learn about the world again—about literature, and philosophy, and ideas that continue to exist and exhilarate no matter how much money I have or will ever have, no matter how overworked I am and will certainly continue to be forever. She says that I am focusing on other things because I do not want to talk about myself: about how the boy I loved that winter had disappeared, about why I am fighting with my mother or about the fact that I am drowning in job applications. I need to do something nice for myself, she says, over and over again.
[...] The miscarriage plunged me, instead, into one in which the upcoming years loomed bland, empty, shapeless. I had just been awarded tenure, and it felt like my life was over: I couldn’t see a future, couldn’t see goals, bench points, markers of meaning. My husband said that I seemed dead for a while.
[...] the Republic is better read as a critique of the status quo than as a straightforward policy proposal. The fundamental claim is that collective well-being depends on the readiness of individuals to act for the common good. Nowadays we tend to see such actions in a moralistic frame that pitches saintly altruism against tawdry egoism, but for the pre-Christian Greeks altruism in the sense of impartiality between one’s own well-being and that of others was pretty much unthinkable: loosely stated, the main thesis of the Republic is that working for the common good is necessary for your own happiness. There are some contexts where it seems totally natural to consider your own well-being as bound up with that of others. Parenting seems like a prime example: when you change a diaper, you’re clearly acting for the sake of someone other than yourself, and so not being egoistic, but at the same time you’re not exactly being altruistic—the fact that it’s your own child means that you have those phantom-limb experiences where another being’s pleasures and pains become your own, so there’s a sense in which you’re relieving your own discomfort. Such expansion of the self can also occur between members of a team: esprit de corps literally means having the spirit of one body. If that spirit could be extended to the whole community, Plato thought, we could speak of a genuine body politic. Many have questioned whether it is possible to extend the notion of “one’s own” that far, but it seems obvious that patriotic feeling has sometimes led to acts of non-altruistic self-sacrifice. Whether such patriotism can be maintained in the absence of existential emergencies or local rivalries is another matter, but for Plato the more important question is whether it can be maintained in the presence of private family ties.
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.