Unconfirmed Reports

A while back I read Specimen Days, by Michael Cunningham. It is a triptych of novellas bound up in a single volume - there was one that I didn’t like at all (”In the Machine”), one I liked so-so (”Like Beauty”), and one I like a lot: “The Children’s Crusade”. This third story is about a group of child terrorists menacing New York. Also, children killing their parents. Crazy and apocalyptic as the story may be, it is true in a way: children do kill their parents, gradually. There is a sense in which the radical “self” - the self-sufficient you, even selfish if you so choose to be - is destroyed by child-rearing.

Heidegger, for all his incomprehensibility, tries to explain the idea of an “authentic self“, which above all makes its own decisions. I can’t help but suspect that Heidegger had no children.

Back on Specimen Days, Michel Faber has this to say of it:

Held back by their attachment to family, friends and lovers, [the characters] stare longingly at the infinite beyond, painfully aware that what they really need is the ability to inhabit the present moment.