There is often a presumption that these two ways of being generative—the physical and the cultural—are at odds with each other. The Romans had a saying: libri aut liberi (books or children), referring to how difficult it was to have it both ways. In fact, in many cultures it has been the case that those who wrote the books—the monks in early Christendom, the Tibetan lamas, or Buddhist monks—were not supposed to have children, at least officially. Yet there are of course many notable exceptions, and the people in this book in general are among them.
