Above the circle of the moon
New life steeped in spittle and excrement with a dash of Montaigne.
As you enter the ninth hour of sluicing milk fat into the quivering mouth of a one-week-old baby, the mind begins to wander.
You contemplate the things you’d rather be doing, the ideas you won’t have, the words you won’t write, the sights you won’t see. Because here you are: sitting awkwardly upright at 2am, backsore, holding a newborn in one hand and a bottle in the other.
You gape in slack-jawed focus on the singular task of shunting a slurry of breast milk, supplemental formula, and microplastic into the gut of this not-so-grateful infant. Your partner wearily sighs as the baby starts to scream again and you begin to think the cosmos are conspiring against you.
In moments of exhaustion-induced zen, you grow less resentful. You wonder, “Is this one of those purgatorial experiences where personal growth is disguised as a discomforting life phase?” Perhaps it’s a sort of “wax on, wax off” training, wherein you build some existential muscle as milkspit dribbles onto your crotch. Or maybe it’s just the domestic crud of keeping a would-be person alive.
Like I said, the mind wanders.
We welcomed our first child into the world a couple weeks ago.
Thus far a newborn has been a contradiction—life upheaving, but also shockingly boring. Commonplace, but incredible. Domestic and exemplary. Seismic and mundane. How curious that the starting point for humanity’s inchoate potential is also the harbinger of a dreary banality of feeding, cleaning, dish washing, and exasperation.
In the windows of time between childcare, I’ve pondered that tension: life’s opening chapter as both sublime and horrible, unique and general. And ruminating on this during a triplefeed cycle, I listened to a podcast on Michel Montaigne from the delightful Past Present Future, a series of political and social commentary from David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge.
Montaigne was a French philosopher who lived during the French Wars of Religion, a series of sectarian conflicts and civil wars in the 1500s. In a period of religious enthusiasm and violence, Montaigne was an idiosyncratic voice. He created the “essay” as a genre, writing inwardly, working from an investigation of the self as a starting point to range broadly over a grab bag of topics like sleep, moderation, cannibalism, vanity, smells, and physiognomy.
I find Montaigne’s meandering essays hard to follow, especially “An Apology for Raymond Semond,” but Runciman’s commentary on the text resonated amid our post-baby fugue. He highlighted that for Montaigne humanity is not separate or above other animals, but shares their base condition. In the Frenchman’s own words:
The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals of the worst condition of the three; and yet in his imagination will be placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the heavens under his feet.
In Montaigne’s view, we live in the quagmire. We’re stuck in “the lowest story of the house,” born, quite literally, mired in shit and gore and viscera. We fool ourselves that things are otherwise with lofty notions of ourselves.
I’m not especially spiritual. But I remain a fierce defender of the human condition. Human minds are exceptional, narrative-creating, idea-generating constructs. We may not be unique in the universe, but we’re more interesting than anything we’ve encountered thus far.
Having a child questions such presumptions. You are dragged down to more base conditions and needs.
A newborn is a totalitarian creature. It consumes, taking not only milk, but time, attention, and energy. Its ends are only its own continuance. And while there are glimmers of something greater than the screaming Stalinist squirming in the basinet, our current existence is rudimentary and bestial.
These first few days have been in thralldom to the most basic of human functions—breathing, eating, shitting. Our waking hours focused on the task of sluicing milk into a pulsing maw and wiping the resulting excretion from the other side.
And yet.
Exhausted, sleepy, and typing frantically as the timer ticks down before the next feeding, I recall moments of, if not transcendence, than a warmth that feels generative:
My wife will herself through a natural childbirth on sheer chutzpa.
Family and friends who dropped everything to keep us alive these past weeks.
Outpourings of love from around the country.
Stillness, however brief, reading a novel out loud as a new family.
A small child nursing to survive, eyes fixed fiercely on the horizon.
Montaigne disparages humans for imagining ourselves “above the circle of the moon.” But therein lies our greatest hope. Yes, we are mired in shit and filth. We are violent, selfish creatures—a bundle of orifices sucking, gaping, consuming, and defecating our way through life. And yet we gaze upwards, eyes to the stars, our heads held up by family and friends to the existential bottle of life, and we wonder if we might be more.
Thanks for reading.
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
For updates about the run, email Katie Klymko at katieklymko at gmail.com to join Breakfast Club’s WhatsApp group. More info on Strava
Tracksmith’s Oakland Twilight 5K - August 24
Thursday, August 24 - Laney College, Oakland, California, 6pm
If you’re in the Bay, come to Oakland for a gut check on the oval. I live a block from Laney College and I’ll hopefully be there for a bit in a Breakfast Club hat and That’s Fine Track Club shirt. Sign up here
Xeets of the week
Parting thought
“Wear your identity like a loose garment.”
- RuPaul
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. You can follow me on Strava, Notes, and what’s left of Twitter.
Congrats on the new member of the family! I was lucky to string together a few meaningful sentences in my first sleep-deprived week as a dad and you're still cranking out the same high-quality posts. Well done!