The domestic bliss of this summer continues while the larger world, lately but also as ever, has seemed quite bad. In the early days of parenthood, I had a weird vision of myself as a kind of nightbird, sitting in my nest of a chair keeping the baby warm and sending out little calls into the world—in the form of online shopping—to say what was needed. I kept lists of the substance of those calls, the things I ordered: breast pump parts, bone broth powder, a different kind of lampshade, dish towels. Everything seemed like I needed it urgently, and I felt good when things arrived. My little midnight cries had been heard.
My relation to things is different now. The baby is interested in the world, and interest for a baby means he puts things in his mouth. The moment he started doing this was distinct. For the first months of his life, we’d spend a lot of time carrying him around the house, holding him so he could look at various things: here’s a houseplant, a clock (he was fascinated by the black-and-white face for a while). Then one day I was introducing him to some orange tulips, and before I could react his little hand was out, and then the tulips were in his little hand, and then the hand was in his mouth. He would not have done this the day before. Tulips are toxic, said Google. I pried the petals from his fist; he had not, fortunately, actually ingested anything.
Now I think of myself not as a nightbird calling but as something like a whale’s baleen. I filter what comes in. I stand between the world and the baby, testing each object before it reaches him: ingestible? Poison? Something he might chew? Plastic? No artificial dyes or preservatives? But also: helpful? Educational? Aesthetically pleasing? Likely to be remembered fondly? The world of baby stuff—and there is so much stuff—is full of hazards. A few times, well-meaning people gave me things made and marketed explicitly for infants that turned out to have been recalled, advised against. And the world of stuff—physical objects, actual facts—is just bad. Already I see the baby notice my phone, my can of Diet Coke. Everything I order comes in too much packaging. It’s wishful thinking, this baleen role, and I know it. I can’t always be the filter.
There’s very little I can put into my son’s hands that I can feel utterly good about—besides, it turns out, books. And the baby loves books—not just being read to, but turning the pages of his board books, which he has done for some time now. His love of books has got me thinking a lot about the book as an object—the codex, the spine and pages, the way you can go forwards or backwards, the way each spread of pages is a new scene, and the fact that you can start over again when you reach the end. I don’t mean that books are always full of good things—of course they’re not—but just that the book itself is kind of intrinsically special, that it does something new to the attention, affords a kind of luxury for eyes and brain. Or—here’s Lisa Robertson, from her essay collection Nilling:
I open the codex: with a skirty murmur, commodiousness arrives.
By commodious I mean: The object furnishes hospitable circumstances for entering and tarrying; it shelters without fastening; it conditions without determining.
Suddenly I remember that people were all sorts of interested in this kind of thinking, technologies of reading etc., when I was in graduate school, but it’s just by watching Julian that I can understand what Robertson means—the hospitality of the object that lets us read, a separate thing from whatever content gets read, if any content at all gets read. It’s taken until now for me to see the book itself as the miracle that it is.