Saying "yes"

Because Helena Iara can say only one word, "é" (if it is, indeed, a word, a problem I have been thinking through for the last several blogs), I'm probably turning it into the most analyzed texts since the rabbis wrote the first commentary on the Tanakh.  None the less, since it is great to talk with her by saying "é, é, é," afterward it makes sense to talk with her about the word.  Today we talked about the second meaning of the word, not so much about being as a simple "yes."

For Friedrich Nietzsche, "yes" and "no" were effective synecdoches to think through philosophy.  Nietzsche diagnosed much of human thinking as "life-denying," as a huge "no" to the reality of existence.  The idea of heaven, for instance, puts all that it perfect elsewhere, after death, which makes the concrete stuff of life into something miserable in comparison.  Nietzsche demanded a different response, a great "yes" to life, but to all of the different parts of life, not just the possible perfection in the future.

As I explained this to Helena, I thought of a conversation I had with a Colombian friend, more than a decade ago, when she and her husband decided to have a child.  Life was terrible in Bogotá at that time, with constant kidnappings and murders, and the renaissance that has now made Bogotá into such a wonderful city had not yet started: the traffic and pollution and simple rudeness of people made it the city a miserable place to live.

In the midst of all of this, I wondered why anyone would chose to have a child, to which my friend responded with one of the wiser ideas I have heard.  "Here in Colombia," she told me, "we know very well that life isn't worth anything.  People will kill you for the price of a cup of coffee.  So if life is going to matter, to be worth something, I knew I had to do it myself.  Adeleida [her daughter] is a bet.  A bet on life.  By deciding to have her, I commit to saying that life matters, that I will make life mean something and be worth something, even if no one else will."

Children can be one of the great ways to say "yes" (though fortunately the only one), not simply to affirm that life matters, as Nietzsche would have it, but to make life matter.  I think I'd missed that in the long years that I didn't want kids.  So just as Helena says "yes, yes, yes" ("é, é, é"), she is affirming life.  And she, in my turn, is a way that I have learned to affirm it, to say that it does matter.