Rulebound

In his new book, American Parent (click here for yesterday's New York Times review), Sam Apple describes his attitude in the months leading up to the birth of his first child. He felt, he writes, that "if I looked into enough theories, explored enough trends and spoke to enough experts, I would be able to find order in the chaos that new parents face in the months before and after the birth of a child."

If only. Apple tries hard, chatting with various specialists and even accompanying, at one point, a nanny surveillance unit on a stakeout, but in the end realizes that even the most conscientious preparation, in this case, can't prevent a sizable degree of unpredictability. Parenting, it seems, ain't quite like chess, or baking muffins: variables just seem to come with the territory.

Which is perhaps as it should be. If it could be regularized, parenting would surely also become routinized, or industrialized. It it could be systematized, furthermore, it wouldn't require the same degree of constant involvement and spontaneity. Raising a newborn can be vexing, but that's where much of the delight lies, as well. Managing to get your month-old to sleep in your arms, after a series of experiments and adjustments, can feel temporarily sublime. Managing to program the clock on your dashboard after consulting the owner's manual is, well, nice.

Certainly, I understand the appeal of predictability. Reliable systems make life easier, and they present huge opportunities for profit. But aren't there at least a few regions of our lives in which we're happier with something less than reliability? Applications like Pandora's Music Genome Project are fun, but there's also a part of me that feels happy that they can't predict, with total success, what I'll like. And, by the same token, I'll take a tiny daughter who occasionally refutes the schemata of the experts. Or, as the writer Samuel Butler once claimed, "Life is like music. It must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule."