In Search of Reality

Baby’s day was videotaped today, principally for her grandmother in Eureka, California. Highlights included: waking up, getting changed, sitting with Mom and Dad at breakfast, taking a bath, going for a walk with the dogs, taking another nap, driving to a Christmas tree lot and buying a tree, going to the doctor’s office for her four-month exam, taking turns in Mom and Dad’s laps for dinner, and going to sleep for the night. With baby snoozing upstairs, the wife and I looked at some of the video and – how could this be so? – it was even more heartwarming than actually being with baby.

I have a couple of ideas as to why. The first is that we remain so nervous when baby is in our care that we don’t relax much. Seeing images of her when we know she survived the experience already felt the way I imagine a farmer feels when he has toiled long and hard and is seeing his life-saving harvest come in from the fields. The second is that, while video is clearly less real than unvideotaped life lived in the present tense, it nonetheless gives the sensation of being more real. Unlike life lived in the present tense, the images captured on video are not constantly disappearing – they are precisely not disappearing at all. Just like the hunters of southern France 17,000 years ago, my wife and I witness representations of ourselves and think, “Well, yes, all of that did happen. I see it right there.”

It did happen, you know.