For the Time Being Read Online Free PDF

blanket corner over his chest; she wraps the left corner around and around, and his weight holds it tight as he lies on his back. Now he is tidy and compact, the size of a one-quart Thermos. She caps his conehead, and gives the bundle a push to slide it down the counter to the end of the line with the others she has just washed.
    The red newborn looks up and studies his surroundings, alert, seemingly pleased, and preternaturally calm, as if enchanted.
    “We move between two darknesses,” E. M. Forster wrote. “The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so.”
    How I love Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest memory! “As I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.” The European kite, two feet long, has a deeply forked tail. Soaring like a swallow, it swoops hawklike to snatch reptiles; it also eats corpses.
    Every few minutes another nurse comes in to pick up whichever washed baby has reached the head of the line. The nurse returns the parcel to its mother. When the red boy’s number is up, I follow.
    The mother is propped on a clean hospital bed. She looks a bit wan. When I was on the ward a few hours ago, I had heard her cry out, thinly,
aaaa!
—until the nurse shut the door. Now the mother is white as the sheets, in her thirties, puffy, pretty, and completely stunned. She accepts compliments on the baby with a lovely smile that costs her such effort it seems best not to address her further. She looks like the cartoon Road Runner who has just had a steamroller drive over it.
    The skinny father is making faces at his son. He keeps checking his watch. “You are thirty minutes old,” he tells him. The nurse has put the baby on his back in a bassinet cart.Americans place infants on their backs now—never on their stomachs, lest they smother in their sleep and die. Ten years ago, Americans placed infants on their stomachs—never on their backs, lest they choke in their sleep and die.
    There are six of us in this room—the parents, the baby, two nurses, and I. Four of us cluster around the baby. The mother, across the room, faces ahead; her eyes are open and unmoving. Winter light pours through a big window beyond her bed. Everyone else is near the door, talking about the baby.
    A nurse unwraps him. He does not like it; he hates being unwrapped. He is still red. His fingernail slivers are red, as if someone had painted nail polish on them. His toenails are red. The nurse shows the father how to swaddle him.
    “You’re forty minutes old,” the father says, “and crying already?”
    “
Aaaa
,” says the baby.
    “I’d just as soon not go through that again, ever,” says the mother to the air at large. Presently she adds that it was an easy labor, only twelve hours.
    “… and then you wrap the last corner tight around the whole works,” the nurse says. As she finishes binding him into his proper Thermos shape, the baby closes his mouth, opens his eyes, and peers about like a sibyl. He looks into our faces. When he meets our eyes in turn, his father and I each say “Hi,” involuntarily. In the nurses, this impulse has perhaps worn out.
    A hole in the earth’s crust releases clear water into the St. John’s River of central Florida at the rate of one hundred million gallons a day. Salt water issues from deep-sea mouths as very hot water and minerals. There iron and sulfur erupt into the sea from under the planet’s crust, and there clays form black towers. In Safad, Isaac Luria began prayers by saying, “Open thou my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.”
    I visit neonatal intensive care. A nurse lifts a baby from a clear plastic isolette. She seats the tiny girl on her lap and feeds her. This baby needs only an ounce more weight to go home. I watch her drain a little milk bottle, three ounces’ worth. She sucks it down in a twinkling. “Did you ever taste that stuff?” one