Little Labours

I still grew up with a sense that it was always nicest to be around men,

Maybe it had been textbook self-defense, or self-loathing, that had kept me from reading books by women.

Godzilla is a childlike creature, innocent of his destructions.

The human baby is useless, the human baby is like no other baby animal, the animals can at least walk, while the human baby is a nothing.

There’s nothing inherently commendable, or deplorable, in liking, or not liking, babies, or women with babies: it is what it is. And I encountered exceptions, in all categories. But when, without a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for years, and then, with a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for months and months, you feel you have slip-slided into another strata or you feel you have gone pre-Cambrian, or, perhaps more accurately, that you are contributing, somehow, to the next geological stratum (or both at once) and you begin to wonder what formed each geological layer, and what really was the geological layer you were in before, and what is the geological layer you are in now, and how was it that each layer seemed, individually, when you were in it, to be everything. Did a meteor crash, or the climate abruptly

describing seeing his children newly born, he wrote, “Far from being young, as young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had traveled an immense distance to find their parents. Then, in a second, they became young.”