I am confident that we are doing the right thing in pursuing this denialism, but I am aware that it is a policy with a strictly limited shelf life. We know that we are protecting him from things it would do him no good to know, and that this is part of the work of love we call parenting. But there are times when it seems that we are protecting him, and protecting ourselves, from a much deeper and more troubling truth: that the world is no place for a child, no place to have taken an innocent person against their will.
The truth is I don’t think enough about the deeper implication of this, of how easy it is to simply turn off the radio when the discussion turns to a bombing campaign in Syria, or to the topic of child abuse in our own country. I rarely think of the sheer randomness of our good fortune, that I can protect him from the horror of the world by reaching for the off button.
That act of switching off is, I realize, not without a certain political friction. Because if I want to teach my children anything, it is precisely not to switch off. What I want to teach them is to listen, to be aware, to consider their relative position in the world, and to be conscious of the ways in which others are less fortunate than they are, and crucially how it might be otherwise. (My own failure to do these things is, of course, an ongoing cause of disappointment and self-censure.)
Intimations of the world’s actuality cannot always be fended off. Walking home along the quays one evening that summer, my son and I passed a couple lying unconscious between two frontal columns of the Four Courts, the man sprawled athwart the body of the woman. It was like walking by an open door on a dark street, and glimpsing through it the cold glow of hell itself—another world entirely, a world inside the world. By sheer luck, he was distracted by a couple of pigeons and never turned his little head toward this vision of ruined tenderness.
* * *
—
My son has a dinosaur’s tooth mounted in a frame over his bed. We bought it in Edinburgh, in a little shop in the Old Town that sells fossils. The tooth once belonged to a Spinosaur that lived out its days in what is nowadays Morocco. It cost me twenty-five pounds, which seemed surprisingly affordable for something that had been around since the late Cretaceous period. Beneath the tooth, on the white cardboard to which it’s affixed, are these words in my own slightly cramped hand: Dinosaur Tooth, Spinosaurus Aegypticus, 69 Million Years Old.
Sometimes when I’m kissing my son good night, or reading him a story, I look up at it and am struck by the sheer oddity of its presence in his bedroom, alongside the various pictures around it—a robot, some rabbits, a raccoon playing the fiddle—this curved incisor from a sixty-foot-long carnivore that went extinct ninety-six million years before our own species appeared on the Earth. It’s the cheap IKEA frame that does it, I think: this remnant of a former world contained in so representative an artifact of our own. I look at it, and time telescopes forward in my mind, and I imagine the whole thing—ancient tooth, slightly less ancient frame—constituting a single compound relic, perhaps mounted somewhere in yet another frame, in a place and time completely inconceivable from the vantage of our own. Wood and Plastic Frame, Northern European Origin, 50 million years old; Dinosaur Tooth, 119 Million Years Old.
And then what comes to mind is the sentence that has haunted me since I heard Caroline come out with it that afternoon as we all sat around the lodge in the highlands: “I wonder whether we humans will make beautiful fossils.”
I think about this sentence a great deal, because the world often gives me cause to remember the damage we’re doing to it, and to ourselves, with our voracious immolation of fossilized organic matter. For example: we flew to Edinburgh and back with the dinosaur tooth, burning more fossilized organic matter as we went, pumping more carbon into the warming air. The frame was bought for about three euros by a company that sells a hundred million limited-life-span household items every year, single-handedly consuming 1 percent of the world’s entire commercial wood supply.
There is no way of contemplating the catastrophe of our way of life from the outside. There is no outside. Here, too, I myself am the contaminant. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.
* * *
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For many years, I considered myself a pessimist. This is not to say that my own experience of life was a miserable one. I was, broadly speaking, a happy and fortunate person for whom the world had laid on a great many privileges and benefits. But to the extent that I could claim to have a basic philosophical position, it was that life, for most people in most places, was characterized by terrible suffering, for no good reason, and that it was unlikely to get any better over time, and that it was therefore on balance probably more trouble than it was worth. Throughout my twenties and into my thirties, the writers who seemed to me to possess the truest vision of the world, who seemed to speak to me out of the deepest wisdom and authority, were those who most firmly denounced the possibility of hope, who rejected most thoroughly the idea that life might be on aggregate a good thing.
In the black gleam of Schopenhauer’s prose, I saw a particular reflection of the world’s true darkness. Certain passages of his struck me, in those days, with the fierce clarity of a divine decree. Lines like these, from “On the Suffering of the World”: “In early youth we sit before the impending course of our life like children at the theatre before the curtain is raised, who sit in happy and excited expectation of the things that are to come. It is a blessing that we do not know what will actually come. For to the man who knows, the children may at times appear to be like innocent delinquents who are condemned not to death, but to life, and have not yet grasped the purport of their sentence.”
Who could argue with such a bracing bleakness, such a brave and rigorous rejection of the world? I for one felt no inclination to do so. Every glance at a newspaper, at the scrolling abyss of my Twitter timeline, was a reaffirmation that everything was both as awful as possible and somehow getting steadily worse. Pessimism seemed the only reasonable position to take in relation to it all—to the relentless degradation of the natural world, the wars and the disasters and the random acts of perverse violence and insanity.
A question I have frequently asked myself is whether the appeal of the apocalypse, in all its vastness and finality, is that it can comfortably absorb the personal fear of death. And not just death, either, but every other ancillary fear, too—of change, of instability, of the unknown, and of the precariousness of life itself, all positions held within it.
Given the world, given the situation, the question that remains is whether having children is a statement of hope, an insistence on the beauty and meaningfulness and basic worth of being here, or an act of human sacrifice. Or is it perhaps some convoluted entanglement of both, a sacrifice of the child—by means of incurring its birth—to the ideal of hope? You want to believe that it is you who have done your children a favor by “giving” them life, but the reverse is at least as true, and probably more so.