One of the interesting things I've noticed in the past few weeks is that Lis and I have both, very naturally, started digging through our own old baby books, photos, etc. I posted the picture of chubby baby me last week, and I've been wondering what I was like back then. It's funny because when you have a kid, that little person is going to be having an experience that all adults have had but pretty much no one remembers. When we look at those old artifacts of our own infancy, I wonder if we're really looking to see if we can recall what we were thinking and doing back then. Pictures turn us into objects, flat little images that supposedly say 1000 words, but can't really tell us much of anything in other ways.

Isn't that strange? Our children start their lives in a state that we cannot really understand. I'd imagine it has everything to do with the fact that we don't start with words. How could you recall anything if you couldn't parse it into language? The world must just be a wild and frankly terrifying blur of color and sound when you're an infant, and the word infant actually derives from the Latin infantem, meaning "not able to speak." Our entry into the world of humans is marked at its core by a kind of alienation, which is kind of sad in a way, but I'm sure it's also a good motivator to get our little selves up to speed on culture. We have our social drives to help us along, which you can see in infants' ability to focus on faces before pretty much anything else (by the by, I wonder if this has anything to do with the difficulty that high Autistic-spectrum children have acquiring language). Anyway, the fact that we get where we do is one of those stunning and gorgeous feats of biology.

I'd imagine that I was mostly just pondering food, based on that pudgy little version me.



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