Caitrin Keiper

We hear the heart rate at 85 bpm. This is close to what mine is, normal for an adult, but it isn’t right for a seven-week embryo’s, whose heart rate should be double that. We all hope for our children to race ahead of us, dream up and do things we never could; in a sense, these early rapid heart rates signify their readiness to do that, to grow and become someone of their own. But this baby isn’t going to.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” wrote James Baldwin. This quote in Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new essay collection We’re Alone captures the dual meaning of the title: the isolation and despair of the oppressed who believe no one is coming to help them, and the intimacy between author and reader, alone together on the page.

The German-born Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt escaped a French internment camp with only a toothbrush to her name and what would become a surprisingly hopeful core tenet in her philosophy: natality. She writes, “Once called into existence, human life cannot turn into nothingness.” What would it be like, wonders Jennifer Banks in her spectacular book Natality, if philosophy were more oriented toward the idea that, in Arendt’s words, humans “are not born in order to die but in order to begin”?