Paternity. Mikhail Epshtein

Foreword
This book is about the beginning of life, about the first twenty months: from the moment when the father first hears the beating of new life in the mother’s stomach, until the moment when the grown daughter begins to walk and talk and the parents decide to have a second child. During this time, the formation of being from non-existence takes place - with many adventures, love conflicts and the tragedy of growing up and alienation.
Authors who write about childhood usually bypass or hastily pass by its very beginning, as not expressed in the language and not fixed in the memory of the child. (Of all Russian literature, it seems that only Sergei Aksakov and Ivan Bunin left a few precious pages [one - Aksakov S. T. Bagrov's grandson's childhood, chapter "Fragmentary Memories"; Bunin I. A. Arsenyev's life, book one, chapters 2-five.].) However, infancy does not hide its secrets, on the contrary, it wants to reveal itself, for which it comes into this world, needing only the counter movement of our word. Precisely because the infant cannot speak, the entire responsibility for discovering the meaning in his silence lies with those close to him.

No other responsibility brings as many amazing privileges as this one. It's like entering another dimension before us. No fantasy is needed—a diary is enough to expose the reality of that experience which has been described by mystics of all times, but in terms more abstract and hazy than the reality of infancy. Fatherhood is the closest and accessible to every person, regardless of profession and talent, the experience of direct participation in the creation of the world. Becoming fathers, we begin to comprehend the secret of the creation of ourselves. I would like to preface this book with the words of the Apostle Paul: “Putting off the old man with his deeds, and putting on the new man, who is renewed in knowledge in the image of Him who created him” (Col. 3: nine-one0). By giving birth to and comprehending the newborn in all its striking novelty, the father himself discovers in himself the image of the eternal Father — and is renewed in this image along with his creation.
However, this transformation has another side. It is the “superhuman” in the father that exposes him to many temptations, one of which is to elevate himself in relation to the child to the Father with a capital letter. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel asked: “To what extent can and should a father perceive himself as if God himself had given him power over children?”[2 - Marcel Gabriel. The Creative Vow as Essence of Fatherhood / Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd. Chicago: Henry Regnery oneninefiveone. P. one22. Marcel's own answer is given from the point of view of Catholic existentialism: “I can give existence to someone else no more than myself ... Our child belongs to us no more than we belong to ourselves, and therefore, it does not exist for our sake, and moreover, not for its own sake” (ibid., p. one20). Gabriel Marcel's essay "Creative Vow as the Essence of Fatherhood" is one of the few attempts to broaden the interpretation of biological fatherhood as a theological category.] This is one of the main questions of this book[3 - This book was written in Moscow in onenine7nine-onenineeight0s. I am grateful to Elena for the joint reflections, from which many records were born. I am grateful to my children, Olya and Mitya, for typing the text of this book on a computer in the late oneninenine0s.].

I. Waiting
Male emptiness is the same way of bearing a fetus as female burden; in return, we are given the lightness of the body, as they are the soaring of the soul.

one

five феinраля onenine7nine года. Finally I heard it. It happened on the ninth day of the fifth month. Cling to my stomach. It immediately seemed to me that the silence was not the same as before - not continuous, but hollow, sensitive, as if someone was hiding in it. Just yesterday, there was a fullness of motherhood, this world, and sounds were heard from here - squelching, sucking, this was the work of the pregnant woman's body. And today this feeling of closeness disappeared: everything parted there and a resounding expanse appeared - silent, that is, capable of speaking. And I wanted to listen to this silence so much that I again clung to my stomach.

And heard. If earlier, by almost daily listening, I had not accustomed my ear to such a deep, bottomless silence, then I would not have perceived this sound now. It reached me at the very tip of my hearing, almost indistinguishable from the noise of my own blood in my ears.

Most of all, it is like breathing, only not constricted by the narrowness of the throat and nostrils, but freely blowing through the whole space; or to the wind, suddenly animated, having acquired the regularity of inhalation and exhalation. The Spirit hovered over the waters... and darkness over the abyss. That the beginning of the universal creation is precisely this, I could confirm with all my hearing: there was an abyss, and it breathed (there is no doubt about the waters and darkness). elastic swelling and the fall of the sound, the ebb and flow ...

That sound is a wave, I also comprehended for the first time. It was obviously the noise of his blood, already circulating in the integrity of the body. It means that he has become himself, his life already betrays itself as a separate, recognizable sound among the many sounds of the mother's body. For the first time he became distinguishable for me, the only one.

This sound was still so far away, felt at the very bottom of the silence, like the quietest in it, that every minute I lost it and no longer knew what I was hearing: the blood of a baby or my own, the louder it rushed to my ears, the deeper I sank into silence.

And yet, at the very edge of hearing, silence kept growing, and behind it - a clear and measured sound, as if circled in the void, much more reliable than blurry tinnitus.

It was so difficult for a child to be born through a father's ear—but still, probably, no more difficult than through a mother's flesh.

2

What does a father feel during these nine months of waiting, if he wants and loves a child - delight, triumph? No! In the mother's womb, everything is full and swells, filled with strength, but in me there is an accursed emptiness, aching and sucking. I have never known such melancholy and sense of senselessness as in this long winter... Work falls out of my hands, no matter how hard I force myself, and after all, the last worldly free months, when it is given to work serenely. But drowsy idleness does not let go: reading unnecessary books and newspapers, absent-minded glances out the window, wandering around the apartment. I even thought of composing, generalizing my winter experience, "Notes on the Blues", but the blues discouraged me from this idea. However, I was going to show that the blues is a feeling of time in its purity and unoccupiedness, the opposite of "care", which always runs ahead of time and shortens it. But now I have nowhere to get rid of it, this is a flat, flat, viscous time, when all nature is in labor and trouble for me, and I am left as an idle spy. I wait, I languish, I look at the clock ...

And it is especially hard to feel barren next to L., in whom her new position caused an unprecedented spiritual upsurge. She works, and understands, and is inspired twice as much as usual, as if this second life had called her and renewed her. But from me, endowed with no less joy, a joint expectation, something is taken away, and all of me is crumpled and discarded, as superfluous, not going to the point. And I'm not the only one with such a decadent experience of the first fatherly joys. We recently visited away two couples, also expecting a baby. Mothers busied themselves in the kitchen, and we, three mature, vigorous and active men, discussed the feelings of our upcoming fatherhood. And we felt the depth of the mystery in what united us, in this causeless longing to live when life doubles ... Wives, with their peace and triumph, could not share our spiritual burden, just as we could not share their carnal burden. I wanted to understand the reason for this general depression of ours. Isn't it fair that we carry the burden in our souls that they carry in the womb? Male emptiness is the same way of bearing a fetus as female burden; in return, we are given the lightness of the body, as they are the soaring of the soul. This is our way of participation in the affairs of nature: in carrying - as in conception. We are to give and be emptied, they are to receive in order to generate excess from ourselves into life. And if both will and working capacity leave us at this time, then grumbling about this is just as absurd and ridiculous as about the loss of semen during conception. Even the ancients noticed that intercourse is always followed by longing - a small death, the emptiness of self-squandering. But after all, pregnancy is, after all, continued intercourse, the giving of the male to the female is already in the making of the third, —