– Do you want to live together for many years, loving each other, without having children? I approve of you with all my heart. Tell me the reasons.
– To have no remorse …
– Good. Specify better.
– Not to add to the pain and shame of the world. So that there isn’t someone more to do evil or suffer from it.
– Very well. But especially the present distresses you, I suppose, and I can well understand you. We are in 1987 and the domination of certain dark forces, at work for a long time, has become almost absolute.
– Yes, and we see it and know it. Our answer is: at least, the demons will not have our children.
– What do you fear, materially and spiritually, for them?
– All… The infected air, the radioactive and chemical leaks (more normal walks than escapes), the distorted food, the water, the inexorable expansion of the desert, of civilization as a desert, desert without borders, the newspapers they would read .. . We would lay clipped feathers in a space barred on all sides, the harrowing eyes of a rabbit from experiments would look at us. But yes, everything, everything is to be feared, and it is not cowardice to fear it, because this everything is without cracks … The violence, the dispossession of homeland, the organs legally torn from dead young people to use them in experiments, the looming of the Gulag, the enslavement to the industrial economy … And the ugly, demeaning clothes they would wear, the sight of trees that no longer breathe … and the love they would no longer know how to give or receive … The sense of poetry would escape him, of poetry as revelation and thought … We would not know how to explain to him: look that this is divine, that this is not cultural …
– Oh yes. Of course… Who would dare to tell you something that was not inspired by the same evil from which you want to protect your unborn, very active in persuading anything? The earth has always been an inhospitable and terrible place, but seeing it treated like this, with such brutality, by endless legions of cannibals … Is there anything else that distresses you?
– There is school, school as an obligation, as a mental prison. This would be enough. How to tolerate sending us defenseless beings, knowing them locked in there, their confused mind frying in those filthy pans … Because we know how cowardly those books, those mouths, that science would corrupt them. And how to take them away? Everywhere is school, the school prison follows you like an ambush everywhere. And then the University, a concentrate of delusions, a Mint of false books, an antechamber of technical hell, a hammer of blind horizons … No, we will give up having children, but we will love and care for the victims of man as we can: animals, trees, children. To the last free born flowers, we will teach the latest Latin.
– I kneel in front of you and get up to bless you. You will never be sterile, never alone, and a “gracious and merciful” God will only be able to forgive you for not complying with the mitzvah of procreation. Barren of soul today are those who consciously procreate, arid those who give creatures to a desert far more cruel than that of the Semitic nomads, which could still miraculously flourish. And inhumane and guilty are those who consign their children to the violence that is the School, with the truly ignoble pretext that, otherwise, they would not know where to put them and what to occupy them. Surely you will enter among the Righteous.
Taken from: Guido Ceronetti, Pensieri del Tè