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REVIEW: The Children of Men, by P.D. James - by John Psmith

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“So how does it feel to be a human being now?” That wasn’t the question I expected to get from my aunt, the first time I saw her after my oldest kid was born. For starters she was a feminist, a prominent academic1 with several books to her name, and somebody who’d always struck me as mercilessly unsentimental. “Do you get it now?” she pressed on. “Before this your life was in shadow, it was fake. Now you’re in the sunlight, now it means something.” She had kids, so despite having some ideological resistance to getting it, she got it. I got it too. It’s hard to describe what “it” is if you haven’t gotten it, but I’ll try to explain. The moment I first held my child, I had a vision of every human being who had ever done the same. I stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot while before my eyes a whole field of ancestors stretched back into the forgotten past, each cradling a baby just like I was doing. What was I without them? Nothing at all. A cosmic joke, a fluke, or a random collection of a

REVIEW: The Children of Men, by P.D. James John Psmith Apr 17, 2023 104 12 12 Share The Children of Men , P.D. James (Faber and Faber, 1992). “So how does it feel to be a human being now?” That wasn’t the question I expected to get from my aunt, the first time I saw her after my oldest kid was born. For starters she was a feminist, a prominent academic 1 with several books to her name, and somebody who’d always struck me as mercilessly unsentimental. “Do you get it now?” she pressed on. “Before this your life was in shadow, it was fake. Now you’re in the sunlight, now it means something.” She

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