Future No Future

Advice for five who have asked about children.

To think the life of the present will be its life in infinite extension: the dream of idiots. Few are so.

Children are risk not replication. The future into which they never asked to be thrown, precarious. The span to come could hold possibility unimagined, all the tions and nesses of desire. Or cattle cars and gas chambers. Pretend that tomorrow is today only with flying saucers and what comes after microwaves. Hope that history wearied itself, at last, with repeats. The holiday of chaos has been infinitely extended, he's not coming back from St Thomas. Pretend, but the world is limned with catastrophe, and borders are centers after all.

The child you did not ask before worlding will ruin your life. What you had closes. Another begins, not yours alone, and you will mourn the loss of something that (let's face it) you never loved as much you do through retrospect, as if it was ever yours to love.

Habit and routine are the nemeses of innovation. The new collaborator will devise art from your ruin. You will hate and you will love. But you will not be one of those who believe that tomorrow is today, that the future is anything less than knifepoint, that you have sent a being forward into death.

And you will cease to be yourself, you will learn your smallness in a world not yours anymore.