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Attending to what is present (never is nothing present, never is nothing worthy of our attention): the greatest challenge to our arrogance. If anything should really come of this (of us, of the baby), we must give up our habitual overlooking, bypassing, ignoring. Not because becoming is a series of steps toward the goal of becoming. So what is it then? Practice begins with the contemplation (not observation) of the baby’s hands. The spreading of his fingers. Then our hands, our fingers.

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We never noticed before: We are exhausted. It feels like a delirium. We’re not hallucinating, but there is no question that reality has gained in gravity. One glance at the baby is enough: Our closeness to Creation is no easy burden. We know: This creature comes from us. Our divinity weighs heavily upon us. How we wish we were merely human.

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Again a dream intrudes. Again it is set in a rich city we happen to be visiting, showing its superabundant wealth and its decay. Grains of plaster are trickling off the facades of splendid buildings. Everywhere we hear this gentle sound. At first we mistake it for summer rain. We recognize its source when we look into the faces of the rich city’s inhabitants. Numb faces, neither friendly nor unfriendly. Then we notice that our baby carriage is empty! We left out baby in the hotel room. We rush back immediately, but we can’t find the way. We ask people for help, but they don’t understand us, nor do we understand a single word of their language. It is so difficult to push the baby carriage along the bumpy streets that we are soon exhausted. Desperately we turn to the owner of a particularly dilapidated house and offer to repair his façade if he will direct us to our hotel. He nods and laughs silently and shows us what has to be done, and gives us a tiny tool and an extremely small pail filled with white paint. No sooner have we started working than we realize we are in front of our hotel. We want to run into our room right away, but the proprietor’s voice holds us back. There, kneeling in the place where he stood, is our baby, painting words in the foreign language onto the baby carriage with white paint. We wake up together.

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The baby permits us to use words without limitation and without insisting on a particular meaning (he appreciates our effort to speak clearly and in a friendly manner). For some reason we think that we have to speak with the baby. We have read books about creatures like him (we know a few things). We hear the others speaking with their babies (anything that is done by everyone without exception can’t possibly be wrong). Language, we think, nourishes the baby even more than milk (your milk) does. It is impossible to imagine ourselves without language. Without language, the world would immediately collapse (this fear is as great as it is unspeakable). Sometimes the baby’s silence can’t help us.help us.

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The baby is older than either of us (you and me). At the sight of him our own age melts away. We are so young, we’re just beginning (not the beginning of a development, that’s clear, we have developed long enough). In our newly attained youth (which immediately makes us euphoric) we feel our age for the first time (which doesn’t affect our euphoria in the slightest): thus the age difference between the baby and us (you, me) fades away again.

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Sometimes we dream together with our eyes open: how the baby stops time. We feel the jolt that makes us reel. And a rumble that drives the plugs from our ears. A new, fresh insight shoots into the place in us where, a moment ago, we still suspected some movement: the stagnation is over! Now that time has ceased, there is no stopping for us. We are growing. We have never seen anything like this before. The baby seems familiar with it. He appears unconcerned. It’s not a dream, he says, breathing softly between parted lips, not even a dream with open eyes.

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The baby pays no heed to the world that came before. (Our own measureless passion for the past almost killed us on several occasions.) But we can’t just drop our caring for and tending to our origins from one day to the next: doesn’t the shape of our baby’s head resemble that of a grandparent? That is one of the baby’s favorite ways of pulling our leg: by having us seek and find similarities (our faith in blood-kinship is unwavering; we find it confirmed on all sides). What we call similarity is our prayer to posterity. But this is one prayer the baby will not answer. If we did not know better, we should have to say: the baby denies any kinship with us altogether.

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We can feel it: nothing is hidden from this baby. We are not hidden from his view. We are more visible than ever (a pleasure that requires no waiting.) The baby reverses our ceaseless desire for concealment, it draws us out of the morass of our ordinariness, which shows in our tendency to disintegrate into habits. Now that we are visible, we are wholly visible (whole). Astonished, we think (now, of all times): This baby lives in seclusion.

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The teacher who dwells inside me, and whom I don’t know. The perfect other within me, whom I resemble in all ways, down to the last hair. He couldn’t be more different from me. We are completely the same. And not at all similar (hard to imagine, because I’m an almost fanatic believer in differences). Without this teacher I cannot take a step. The baby, I think–and a connection suggests itself: that the unknown, indwelling teacher is the baby. It’s clever of him not to be able to come up with an explanation for this impossibility (we resemble each other after all).

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We feel the baby’s selfless efforts to understand us. And immediately (a flash of insight) we rush to assure ourselves that surely it can’t be his goal in life to understand us (the fact that this is a necessity proves nothing). Do we ever try to understand anyone the way the baby tries to understand us? Without prejudice (do we even know what that would be like?), with open curiosity (not the grasping kind), without foreknowledge and references, wholeheartedly? (Could we put into words how far ahead of us the baby is?)