One Saturday that summer, we were in the park with two friends of ours, sitting on rugs, eating crisps and sandwiches and basking in the lingering heat of the afternoon. They had a baby son not much older than our little girl. The babies were asleep in their buggies, blankets draped downward over the canopies to shade them from the sun. My wife asked our friends if they had any designs on a third child. No, they said. With two, if there was ever some kind of emergency situation and they needed to leave quickly, they could grab one child each and run; with three you were much less mobile. They were sort of joking, but also sort of not.
This idea was one that we returned to now and then through that summer, my wife and I. Should we continue to hold on to certain baby accoutrements, in case we might want to “go again”? There would be a pause, and one of us would say it: with two, we could take one each and run.
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There was, in those days, a meme that was ubiquitous on social media, a two-panel cartoon of a dog sitting at a table, the room around him engulfed in flames. In the first panel, the dog is smiling, a coffee cup on the table in front of him. In the second, he is smiling even more resolutely, though the flames are growing nearer, and a speech bubble has him saying “This is fine.” I thought about that meme a lot in those days. It came up in a lot of conversations. We would see the wildfires on the edges of Europe, the furious red of the map, the grass turning brownish yellow in the park, and we would say that this was fine, and we would try to mean it, though we knew that we did not.
I mentioned the meme to my therapist one day. She was not familiar with it—a gap in her knowledge that I found, in the end, quietly reassuring—but she knew what I was getting at in bringing it up.
“Do you ever expose yourself to other kinds of views?” she asked.
“What kind of views?” I said. “That everything might not be fucked?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “There is a psychologist, quite famous, who has written a book about how everything has been getting better for humanity over time, and that this is the best moment in history to be alive.”
“Are you talking about Steven Pinker?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I am terrible with names.”
“Voluminous mane of silver ringlets? Looks like Brian May out of Queen? Goes on about the Enlightenment all the time?”
“Yes,” she said, “I think that’s him.”
“I don’t find him particularly convincing,” I said, more dismissively than I intended to.
She shrugged in a particularly French-seeming way, raising her eyebrows, dipping her head to one side. She was clearly not willing to sacrifice the last fifteen minutes of our session to a defense of Steven Pinker.
There was a silence then, during which I gazed out the window and listened to the bell of an approaching tram, and fell to thinking about Pinker’s hair. I couldn’t decide whether he had great hair or terrible hair. Like the world itself, I reflected, it depended on the attitude you took toward it. For a prominent champion of Enlightenment values—progress, reason, science, all that—the hair was certainly thematically consistent, in that it looked like one of those powdered wigs men went around wearing in the eighteenth century. I decided that it was resolutely the hair of an optimist, but that in spite of this—or perhaps because of it—it was in fact very bad hair. It struck me then, as I continued to stare out the window, how odd it was that so many of the great pessimist thinkers had, by contrast, terrific hair. I thought of Samuel Beckett, with his incomparable steely crest and his pitiless vision of a meaningless existence, and of E. M. Cioran, who for all his eloquent condemnation of existence as an irrecoverable catastrophe, sported what was surely the most lusciously debonair coiffure in the entire history of philosophy. And then there was Kafka himself, with his great partitioned dome of jet-black hair, established above his high forehead like an auxiliary brain. It was interesting, I thought, how these men managed to maintain both punctiliously styled hair and unremittingly bleak views of human existence.
“What’s coming up for you?” asked my therapist.
“Nothing much,” I said.
This was a thing that happened often in therapy. There would be a long silence and I would find myself having the most inane and frivolous thoughts—thoughts which, even when pressed to speak about what was on my mind, I found myself reluctant to put into words, for fear it might seem I was taking the whole process insufficiently seriously.
I talked, as I often did in therapy, of my sense of a not-yet-manifested crisis, of the apprehension I nurtured that everything was, in some hazily delineated but nonetheless absolute sense, destined to go to shit. My therapist wanted to know whether this sense of impending crisis was something I was thinking or feeling.
“I find it hard to say,” I said. “The distinction between thinking and feeling isn’t as clear for me as it is for you.”
“But they are two very different things,” she insisted. “I notice you make gestures toward your head when you speak of this, which suggests to me that it is something you are thinking.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But can’t you feel things in your head?”
She gave me one of her looks of humorous admonishment. For reasons that were essentially mysterious to me, these facial expressions were among her most effective tools in keeping me from excessive abstraction, from shallow intellectual gamesmanship.
What I felt, I said, could be described as joy, at least a fair amount of the time. I had a family now, two children who with every passing day deepened and strengthened my involvement in the world, my sense of life as a good and worthwhile and even beautiful thing. A couple of weeks ago, I had been at home with flu. I had been in bed all afternoon, I told her, drifting in and out of sleep, when I heard my son sneaking into the room. I remained with my face to the wall, pretending to be fast asleep in the hope that this would discourage him from harassing me with demands that I read him a story or otherwise entertain him. I felt him climbing slowly onto the bed, felt the weight of his small body on the mattress, sure that he was preparing to shock me into full wakefulness by jumping on the bed and shouting. But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that he leaned in gently toward me and kissed me on the back of the head, before climbing back down off the bed and creeping back out of the room and closing the door behind him.
It was, I said to my therapist, the sweetest and most tender thing I’d ever known him to do. I was so disarmed by it I felt that my heart might break with joy. What really got me, I said, was the realization that this was a thing I myself did: I’d come into his room at night to check he hadn’t kicked the covers off him in his sleep, hadn’t wet the bed, and I would do exactly what he had just done to me—I would kiss him on the top of the head, the back of the neck, and retreat quietly from the room. There was something so beautiful, I said, about the thought that he must have been conscious enough, even in his sleep, to internalize this gesture of protective love, and to return it to me in this way.