The author of the first had recently become a father. The tone of his article was valedictory, funereal. Its subject was the death of freedom, its untimely murder by the state of parenthood. In form it was curiously poetic: a brisk tour of the man’s love for his newborn child – Oh babe, with thy pearly limbs, thy jewel-bright eye!, etc. – is quickly followed – but too late, too late – by his realisation that his custody of this gem poses a serious threat to his ability to go to New York for the weekend, as he was wont to do at this time of year to do his Christmas shopping. New life has arrived like a letter-bomb, a mere wrapping for the death of pleasure. In an imaginative passage, he tries going to New York in his mind with his wife and child, and a miserable trip it certainly is. They can’t go out in the evening, shops and museums are a chore, the hours on an airplane pure torture. I shan’t bother to go, he declares bitterly. He realises that eighteen years of this lie ahead of him.
