Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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One exercise involving our baby requires us to redefine the meaning of a word. Most words are old acquaintances, things used a thousand times, petrified in their knownness, in their use: thus we regularly slide into abstraction, a little sad about that, but also proud of our intellectual capacity. We already knew what duration is, we just weren’t familiar with it. Our baby’s appearance (another well-known yet unfamiliar word that strikes us) permits us to see duration. It works like this: We see the baby and see duration. And like this: We don’t see the baby (perhaps you or I have gone somewhere with him) and see duration. Naturally: Duration is that which cannot be interrupted. Very simple, this exercise. 

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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oder über den Online-Buchhandel

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

http://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/buch/babybuddha/978-3-446-25239-4/

oder über den Online-Buchhandel

With the baby on my back I am hiking toward my own past (it’s a backpack I like to carry: a breathing, babbling, sleeping weight that does not pull me down, as if for my benefit it had made a pact with gravity). It is good to travel on foot, step by step, toward the place my own babyhood. In the end it is as if I were stepping into a clearing: relieved, I stand in front of a house that feels neither foreign nor familiar. This moment promises nothing, and so (after some astonishment) I can confidently turn back (perhaps that is the spirit of all babies, that they accompany us to the places where we imagine our secrets might be hidden, but where we no longer find them).

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Who else has our permission (without reproach or punishment) to tear our eyeglasses off our nose and throw them aside? The patience we lose so easily on other occasions, here it never abandons us. This little rampaging baby (our baby) has brought out in us an angelic patience that has become our second nature. What the baby does is just what it is: tearing the glasses off our nose and throwing them aside (with pleasure). No admonishing voice demands that we put a stop to this. This is how we are (we want to be like this more often), we think, why don’t we go outside and find someone to tear the glasses off our nose and throw them aside?

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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oder über den Online-Buchhandel

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

http://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/buch/babybuddha/978-3-446-25239-4/

oder über den Online-Buchhandel

In the rich city, we find it particularly hard to distinguish dream and reality. In the morning we (the baby, you, I) arrive by train. As we get out at our destination and walk toward the elevator, we see on the opposite platform a large crowd of refugees who are following the directions of the police and slowly pushing down a flight of stairs. The sight is so haunting it makes us tremble. It is hard to look over there, hard not to look. All day the crowd of refugees stays in our memory. And during the night we dream of it. Exactly the way we saw it. Everything is the same: our getting out of the train, seeing the refugees, the policemen, who are big and looked almost padded, our trembling, our reticence and curiosity to look in their direction. And how we forget our baby for a few moments. The moment we check to see if he is still in his stroller, we realize it is too late for that now.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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The baby’s gaze as he looks at me. Open. Calm. Silent. Suddenly I feel sorry for him. (This is now my feeling, only my feeling, not shareable, but not because I do not wish to share it. Just as the baby’s gaze is meant for me, so is my feeling.) What is it that I regret on my baby’s behalf? Is it this undefended gaze, which he will lose? Do I regret having lost it? I look at the baby, but am not returning his gaze. I cannot return such a gaze. The baby persists. He tilts his head toward mine. Beckons me. Knocks his forehead against my forehead. Beckons me to enter his gaze. It takes an eternity. Then I think: my baby. And I see that he sees my gaze as I look at him: Open. Calm. Silent.    

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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And then: our beloved baby is getting on our nerves. His obstinacy (in resisting some everyday routine) provokes our impatience. And our obstinacy. (And a bit of rage, incomprehension, perplexity). First we feel a stab, then a hole opens up, promising nothing good. We are in danger of losing our composure. But obstinacy does not seem to be obstinacy. The baby’s and his parents’ obstinacy are not at all the same. His obstinacy is not a reaction, as ours is. And immediately we believe that the obstinacy that has us in its grip is a false obstinacy, due to our having ceased to continue admiring our baby’s obstinacy. To follow him. To serve him.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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When our baby’s warm, soft hand lies in ours, we are astonished by the enormous affinity and closeness that imparts itself throughout a warm field between our hands (but where would there be any space between our hands?). What feels so trusting and so undemanding here is actually something impersonal. This scares us: Haven’t we always thought of intimacy with another human being as something utterly personal? But now it seems to us (with our baby’s small, soft hand in our own) that even this momentary fright is of an impersonal nature and only strengthens our affinity and closeness.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Our modesty (since the birth of our baby) is for us the greatest surprise (after the baby himself). We look at each other (you look at me, I look at you) and say: Surely we will become immodest again. It is a question of time. Our baby grows and grows, and then one day you will become immodest first, or I will become immodest first, or we will both become immodest at the same time. There’s nothing to do about that, we say, but we could try, just as the arising of our modesty was and is a great miracle, to let the arising of our immodesty become an equally great miracle. When our baby looks at us, we worry that maybe now he thinks we lost our modesty long ago, but then he pulls himself up to the shelf next to the couch and reaches with his right hand for your grandmother’s crystal bowl and knocks it to the ground. (The bowl breaks and we say, is this a whole other kind of miracle? Would you have believed that our baby can reach that high up?)