Excitement and litost

Perhaps we could think of babies as explorers. Initially, their discoveries are rather modest: in learning to track an object visually, or to open their little bunched hands, they're not venturing far from the town in which they were born. It's like discovering a nearby creek, or stand of willows. Over the next few months, though, they become more ambitious, and their finds more impressive. Smiling, grasping objects, laughing, raising the head: they're building canoes that wander up and down the local river, and they're mapping the foothills of the nearby range. And then things get really interesting. In the Middle Ages, Gael hermits found the Faeroe Islands, and European sailors charted the Azores. In their fifth month, many babies find their toes, and learn to sit, while holding pushing with their hands, and learn to roll over. New horizons emerge.

This past weekend, Cleo rolled over, intentionally, from her stomach to her back for the first time. She repeated the trick twice yesterday, and three times today (meaning that, if she keeps up the pace, she should be able to do it roughly 6,795 times in a day when she turns 19). In fact, the event's become predictable enough that I simply shot it on our camera today: see above.

Admittedly, that's not the most overpowering piece of footage, and in one sense, rolling over is a small thing: even after she's rolled over, after all, Cleo's still an inarticulate and totally dependent baby. But don't knock the video; after all, even the Zapruder film is rather unimpressive, on a purely visual level. Rather, it's what the images, and the acts they depict, suggest that can bowl you over. Here's what I mean. There have been many times over the past five months where I've passively assumed that what I'm doing must be what fatherhood involves: cradling, talking without meriting a response; feeding. But suddenly, in a single action, it became clear that there will be vast changes, and that slowly, slowly, Cleo will earn a total autonomy and eventually have little need of us.

That thought is both awesome and deflating, at once. I was simply stunned by the realization, made concrete in her new skill, that she really is a person who is slowly growing into something fuller and more complete. Amazed, I spoke to her in a different tone of voice, with new respect. But at the same time, I was also reminded of Milan Kundera's description of an untranslatable Czech word, litost. Kundera roughly renders the word as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery," but the example that he offers is more memorable. Think of a boy, he says, who wanders into the ocean with his girlfriend, who is a strong swimmer. The two play in the waves, and then start to swim; the girl politely restrains her pace, so that he can keep up. But then her body simply follows its own athletic logic, and she pulls away, a graceful dart in the waves.

What the boy, left behind, feels is litost. What I felt, watching Cleo roll over, was similar.