(reprisal of that unspoken conclusion: Anders doesn't want to be happy).
The obverse argument might go something like this: parenthood is the easiest and most universally attainable great goal of life, but it is also much more. Most importantly, it is a reminder that the multitude of other goals - goals which usually, but not always, involve money, fame, prestige, legacy, reverence...in short, material recognition of the contribution we have made in the world - are nothing but trivialities extolled by our sick Age, worth all but nothing when compared with the genuine Happiness afforded one by raising a family.
Clearly these two positions represent polar extremes, and the majority of opinions will lie somewhere in the middle. But what about mine? Didn't I come under the 'dogmatically childless' category? Avoiding overpopulation, you say. Perpetual bachelor, you say. Immature, depressive, lacking, you say.
Not quite. As it happens, my reasons are far more abject, far more morbid than those common suppositions.
I do not want to be happy: I am happy. Much as the world dismays me, my love for life is nevertheless immutable. However, my relationship with all animate beings around me might be classified as hyper-sensitive: I am unable to comprehend bad things happening to others in any capacity, and much less the idea of myself as the engineer or perpetrator of those bad things. Thus, while wholly pacifist, I must maintain a degree of social and political disengagement in order to protect my hyper-sensitivities from being over-inflamed. But bad things happen. Like it, lump it, be thoroughly horrified by the thought: bad things happen.
Wait a minute: what does all of this have to do with my stance on children? Clever cookies may have already figured that out. Nothing I have yet said would indicate that I do not like children, or that I consider having them some kind of a weak-minded cop-out. In fact, my sentiments comport much better with the argument couched in the second paragraph. I can imagine no greater joy than conceiving, raising and sending off into the world a human being I am proud of, of whom I can say honestly: there goes a person who knows how to love themselves and others and their environment, whose priorities are not in the order of the present day, but in the order of tomorrow and forever. What is more, I know of at least one woman who has appeared before me in contemplation and in dream as a perfect mother for my - never to exist - children.
But I am afraid to say that my hyper-sensitivity to life is a formidable barrier to parenthood, perhaps an insurmountable one. How could my conscience carry upon its back an injured child, a dead child, a child who fell prey to one of those legions of bad things in the world that I knew were out there? How impossible life would become! If an assaulted animal causes me to weep tears of unbearable sorrow, how could I even countenance the thought of engendering a child who was bound to suffer, and even more assuredly bound to die? No matter what accompanying happiness, that I had consigned my own flesh and blood to suffer and die? Ultimately, what sort of child deserves such a melodramatic wretch for a father? It simply wouldn't be fair. I therefore cannot envision having children for the good of the child, not for me.
I said in the first post of this blog that I wasn't especially good with Death. Until our relationship improves, the possibility of my conceiving new Life seems equally fragile.
Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle along the road- or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along, -don't fly off,- but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;- and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do any thing.- only keep your temper.
-Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
No comments:
Post a Comment