My daughter has intensely blue eyes, bright, cerulean, sky, and turquoise all mixed and glittering in mesmerizing orbs. Life, light, and laughter shimmer there, along with the hints of her own kind of wisdom.
Where did this depth come from? Where this character, this soul? She is both mine and not mine.
No human achievement can compare with the emergence of a soul. The greatest works of art or ingenuity are only frail attempts to capture the mysterious radiance glittering in the eyes of those we love – this miracle of life and all it brings with it.
The Renaissance poet Ben Jonson, reflecting on the death of his son, wrote, “Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, ‘Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’” Jonson recognized that of all the things he’d made or written, the most beautiful and most poetic was his son.
When viewed aright, fatherhood fulfills for a man that most fundamental of urges, the instinct to create. From little boys building castles out of blocks to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, men yearn to make things. This impulse undergirds the great political, economic, and artistic achievements, where we seek to reshape, reframe, and revive the world as we find it. It’s something primordial.
Art is a special kind of making. Aristotle famously explained in “Poetics” that art is essentially mimetic. The Greek word “mimesis” refers to “imitation,” “mimicry,” or “representation.” Inflamed by love and admiration, the artist aims to capture, recreate, and celebrate the things of life. The artistic endeavor involves imitation for the sake of perpetuating and celebrating something of remarkable value. At its core, art affirms the world.
As another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote, “Glory be to God for dappled things – / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; / Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough.” This ecstatic exclamation of admiration draws the artist into a song of imitative praise.
Hopkins loves the intricate, diverse, abundance of beauty, oddity, and wonder that saturates and suffuses the creation. Since love craves expression and since we imitate that which we admire, his love finds manifestation in poetic mimesis, an imitation of a special kind.
This “imitation” is not the same as mere copying. The artist “does not so much aim at presenting copies of reality as rather making visible and tangible in speech, sound, color, and stone the archetypical essences of all things as he was privileged to perceive them,” philosopher Josef Pieper wrote in “Only the Lover Sings.” “[A]ll forms of ‘liberal’ activities, above all in the area of the arts, are essentially of a festive nature as long as they contain at least some remote echo of that fundamental attitude of acceptance [of the universe].”
I propose, then, that one of the greatest forms of art is parenthood. Can there be a greater expression of “that fundamental attitude of acceptance” and affirmation of existence?
I will speak from the perspective of a husband and father, since that is what I know. Conceiving and raising a child is a premier form of art on at least two levels. First, it is the fulfillment of the art of romance. When a man loves a woman, he wishes to imitate – in the sense of reiterate, perpetuate, and celebrate – the beauty of that woman. He wishes to affirm her goodness in the deepest possible way.
This is what the child is: He reiterates, perpetuates, and celebrates the physical and spiritual qualities of his mother. He is a mimetic expression of her. This is part of why the father finds so much joy in the child, as he sees in the child the elaboration and extrapolation, the full flowering, of everything he loves in the mother.
“Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house. Thy children like olive plants round about thy table.” (Psalm 127:3). This is the joy and artistry of the father.
But it goes further. The choice to marry and have children represents art on an even larger scale. It affirms not only the goodness and beauty of a woman, but also the goodness and beauty of a world. Every birth is a recapitulation of creation, for the whole creation will now “repeat itself” in a new set of eyes. It is thus an act of love of the world and existence. And an act of faith, an unspoken assent to the proposition that life is worth living, in spite of its tragedy. It is, finally, an act of hope – that this world will not disappoint the new, tiny person lying in the father’s arms, gazing up at him.
The man who chooses to have a child in spite of struggle, pain, loss, tragedy, injustice, evil, and all the rest offers a testament to a kind of cosmic optimism, an optimism that sometimes flies in the face of appearances. He affirms, “I say yes to the world and to life, with my whole being, come what may.”
And that word of affirmation takes the form of a person in a movement that, again, recapitulates the deepest pattern of Being Itself.
Before becoming a writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy. His writing has appeared in over a dozen outlets, including The Hemingway Review, The Epoch Times, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, Hologram and Song of Spheres.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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