The slumbering trees
It’s 4:17 a.m. Day 11. Coffee’s ready. Camille won’t sleep except for on top of Christine. I’m watching her so she doesn’t suffocate. I hear the rhythm of the white noise radiating from the sound machine. Or maybe that’s the blood pulsating through my ears. They say sleep gets better. At the moment, however, we feed her just about every hour through the night. I keep thinking about that line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!” Trees sleep more than we do.
The Huckleberry app
I’m restless, thinking about work, money, my worsening dad bod. I’ve never had so much time off. I worry Christine isn’t getting enough sleep.
It’s not all hard, of course. Camille’s giant blue eyes pierce right through me in the dark purple night. Her brain isn’t developed enough to have thoughts, so they tell me, but I’m inclined to think she’s plundering the depths of the meaning of life, wondering how we landed on this spinning rock hurtling through the vacuum of space, whether her soul was implanted at conception, as Tertullian believed, or in utero, or perhaps at birth, immediately endowed with all the dignity and imaginative fury of the Creator himself. Maybe she was just pooping. She smiled at me.
I also keep thinking about writing her a book. I’ll call it Letters to My Daughter, with a similar tone you’re reading now. There are ten chapters: Future, Faith, Family, Friendship, Food, Fitness, Finance, Function, Fun, and A Foundation to Fend for and Find Yourself. Alliteration is chef’s kiss.
The first chapter begins with where we are in history, today, the eternal Present, to catch her up on what’s happened and what is likely to happen as she grows up. Our great intellectual tradition in Western civilization stems from a few key thinkers and their place in history: Beginning with the classics of ancient Greece spread by the conquests of Alexander the Great, moved along by Augustine and the fall of the western Roman empire in the fifth century, shifting northward through Turkey and the fall of Constantinople, blossoming in Islamic Andalusia and Renaissance Italy, then France and her revolutions, then England and hers, voyaging across the Atlantic, and flourishing until Camille was born last week. And now a new revolution is set to begin thanks to the lingering effects of a global pandemic, destabilizing American hegemony, and advancing technology.
The next chapter, Faith, opens with the dark night of the soul. What are we doing here anyway? What is the Aristotelean unmoved mover or the Cartesian raison d’être? Would it be better, as Job asked, to have never been born at all? I want her to know it’s okay to fail, to wrestle with complex emotions like fear, shame, love, and joy. I want her to know there is a God who loves her more than I ever will, to know what he’s like, to hang her hat on something big. I want her to know how to read the Bible for herself so that—when invariably the surrounding culture screams at her about what “Christianity” is supposed to be about, and for when the eternal Footman will one day hold her coat and snicker—she’ll be ready.
The chapter on Family will tell of her lineage, from Italy and France, the outpost in Georgia, the boudin balls in Louisiana, the rolling bluegrass hills and the sweet smell of bourbon in Kentucky. The chapter on Friendship will tell her about Samwise Gamgee, Hermione Granger, and the importance of scrupulously selecting her closest people. On Food and Fitness, she’ll learn about how to fuel her growing body, about how her brain requires calories, which renders it in some ways to nothing more than an economic calculating machine, avoiding cognitive load and taking shortcuts to save energy; about Michelin-star restaurants in Zurich and Paris, cacio e pepe in the shadow of the Roman colosseum, and fresh octopus in Lisbon’s Alfama district; about how the longest living people in the so-called Blue Zones work out every day and eat lean meat, drink wine, and live a slow and fulfilled life free of worry.
Finance, she will discover, is the creative force powering that fulfilled life. She’ll learn how interest rates are God’s fingers for constraining demand, creating wealth, and building heaven on earth, how cash is king, and how money isn’t everything. Economists, from Hayek to Sowell, will be her guide to learn how the machine works and how to avoid underestimating the power of incentives. This will help her find her career, her Function. She’ll know that, though art history is just the best, Dad, really it is, there is nevertheless low demand for that particular skill in the current labor market, a fact that comes with its own trade-offs one must weigh carefully. A good fit could be where her innate ability corresponds to a market need and a trifle of enjoyment. Passion, be damned. Her Function is not just a career, of course, but her role as a daughter, a sister, a friend, a voter, and, one day, Deo volente, a mother.
All this is well and good, but she must learn that there’s a proper place for everything, especially Fun. “Of making many books there is no end,” wrote the Teacher, “and much study is a weariness of the flesh… She who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” I’ll write about watching fail videos after a scary show with her mom before bed, reminisce about old Vines, the butt stump in Muir Woods, and making fun of contestants on The Bachelor. And toots. We can’t forget toots.
The point is to help her find herself earlier in life than I did. I want her to know who she is—deep down inside her bones—so she can fend for herself when life’s inevitable winds beat against her walls. I want her to build her home on the rock. I want her to know there’s a big, wild world out there full of books and food and friendship. I want her to be better than me.
Of course, she’ll probably disregard everything we parents tell her because, well, that’s what kids do. That’s what I did. Nevertheless, I persisted. And over the years she’ll learn how to do that too, much like she did tonight.
