After all, now that children don’t till your fields or take you in when you’re incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it’s amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all. By contrast, love, story, content, faith in the human “thing”—the modern incentives are like dirigibles, immense, floating, and few; optimistic, largehearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.