The Infant

There is a wail of inarticulate need, that is a child's first grasping after language, for sounds that mean 'wet' or 'food' or 'pin'. There's a shriek of terror - that there is no one here and that there may never be anyone here ever again. There's that latitudinous wah-wah not unlike the call the call to mosque in the middle-east; this is creative crying, fun crying, from babies who while not especially unhappy have failed to register that we like to constrain weeping to conditions of distress.

And perhaps saddest of all is the muted, habitual mewl of a baby who may be perfectly miserable but who, whether through neglect or prescience, no longer anticipates reprieve - who, in infancy, has already become reconciled to the idea that to live is to suffer.