Babies
The most adorable picture in the history of the world.
Look, I know what you’re thinking, and once I thought as you did. Who wants to look at pictures of other people’s babies? Doting grandparents, dotty officefathers, with images of their progeny plastered on their walls and foisted on their visitors - good for you, said I in my heart, you are associated with a tiny human. Small, squashy, inarticulate, not really distinguishable from all the other ones. Yee for you. But now I understand them - they are simply performing the rightful human office of sharing good things with others, and what could be a better thing than the most adorable baby in the world?
I was thinking about babies the other day. The smile of an infant who has just learned to smile is practically heartbreaking; why is that? Is this because the smile is the first time that the child can not only express, but communicate its happiness? It figures out how to communicate unhappiness pretty goshdarn quick, but happiness takes a while longer. Or it because of the purity of just about any emotion expressed by a three-month-old? Sure, you’ll be a deeper and more complex person twenty years from now, with increased capacity for comprehension and for response. But can you, twenty years from now, be purely and simply happy with your whole heart?* No, it’s all downhill from three months old.
*The sad thing is that twenty years from now, being tired and hungry will still make you cranky and hard to deal with.
Jesus, God, the Michael Nehring progeny. She is pretty cute.
What’s amazing to me about an infant’s expressions is the obvious depth of interiority already there, which is of course to take a step back from your particular points about contentedness. It makes me think about the continuity of soul, both of an individual human, and of human beings with other animals. It’s easy to think that humans don’t achieve human status until we can talk and, more importantly, remember things for the long term. “When did I start? Well, around about age two, I guess. That’s what I remember.” And that’s true in a certain respect.
Infants remind us that we weren’t just machines before we happened to remember things, and their features help us believe in the comprehensibility of their emotions. That in turn demonstrates that pre-logical animals do have souls with features in common with us.
June 28th, 2008 at 2:01 pm“Yee for you.” A line for the ages.
June 29th, 2008 at 4:55 pmAnd congratulations!! You’ll make the best aunt.
July 5th, 2008 at 10:08 pm