The Children of Men

by P.D. James

Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anaesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures.

But across continents, national and racial boundaries, we watched each other suspiciously, obsessively, feeding on rumour and speculation.

People Can't get along ever apparently

the frozen sperm stored for experiment and artificial insemination had lost its potency

Men are the infertile ones

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

After I killed Natalie

What

Today is my daughter’s birthday, would have been my daughter’s birthday if I hadn’t run her over and killed her.

Oh

She is originally from Alabama but left the United States in 2019, probably because her brand of religious hedonism is over-supplied there.

Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

“The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

“What are the best possible circumstances? Women have given birth in war, revolutions, famine, concentration camps, on the march. She’s got the essentials, you and a midwife she trusts.”