Janusz Korczak, How to Love Children (1919) Selected Works, (trans by J. Bachrach) Warsaw, 1967, p. 84-87

 

1. You say: 

"My baby."

 

If ever, it is only while you are pregnant that you have the right to use that term. The beating of the tiny heart, no bigger than a peach stone is but an echo of your own pulse. Your inhalation provides it with air to breathe. The same blood runs through its and your veins, and not a single drop of your red blood knows whether it will remains yours or its, or will be spilled to perish as a toll collected by the mystery  of conception and delivery. The bit of bread that you are munching is the building material for the legs on which it will toddle along, for the skin that will cover them, for the eyes that will see, the brain which will be illuminated by a thought, arms which it will be stretching out to you, and the smile to accompany the cry: “Mama”.

 

You two are predestined to spend a crucial moment together: together in a single bath of pain, you both will suffer. The chimes will strike the hour – the signal:

“On the Mark.”

 

And simultaneously it will say: “I want to live my own life.” And you will say: “ From now on, live your own life.” […]

 

2. 

The child you have delivered weighs ten pounds. There are eight pounds of water and a handful of carbon, calcium, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus and iron. You have given birth to eight pounds of water and two pound of ash. And drop-by-drop what goes to make your child has been cloud vapor, snow crystal, mist, dew, the mountain spring and the scum of a city gutter. Every atom of carbon or nitrogen has been bound into millions of different combinations.

 

You yourself have taken only that which has to be gotten.

 

Earth suspended in infinity. Its close companion – the sun – fifty million miles away. The diameter of this minute globe of ours is just three thousand miles of fire with a thin, ten-mile deep, cool crust. Spattered upon that thin crust stuffed with fire amidst the oceans, is land. Upon land, amidst trees and bushes, insects, birds and animals men swarms like ants. Among these millions of men, you have brought forth one more – is it not so? – something infinitely minute, a speck of dust – a nothing.

 

It is so fragile that it may be destroyed by any bacteria which, even when magnified a thousand times is but a dot in the field of the view. But that “nothing” is the brother, the flesh and blood, of every sea wave, of the wind and the thunderbolt, of the sun and the Milky Way. That speck of grass, of every oak and palm – of every chick, lion cub, colt and pup.

 

There is something within it that feels and scrutinizes –suffers, desires and rejoices, loves, trusts and hates – believes, doubts, draws close and turns away.That speck embraces in thought everything: the stars and oceans, mountains and abysses. And what is the substance of its soul if not the universe, though dimensionless?

 

Herein the contradiction in the human being, rose from dust, which God has made his dwelling. (p. 85-87)

 

3.  You say:

“My baby.” It is not. The child is a common property, he belongs to the mother and father, the grandfathers and grandmothers.

Some distant “I” that was dormant in any array of forefathers, the voice of a disintegrating, long forgotten coffin suddenly begins to speak through your child.

 

Three hundred years ago , in war or peace, someone possessed someone else, in the Kaleidoscope of crossing races, people and classes – with consent or by violence, in a moment of horror or amorous intoxication – someone committed adultery or seduced, nobody knows who and when, but God has written it down in the book of destinies, and the anthropologist tries to divine it from the shape of the skull and the color of the hair.

 

Sometimes a sensitive child fancies that he is a foundling in his parents’ home. It may be so: his begetter died a century ago.

The child is like a parchment densely filled with minute hieroglyphs, and you are able to decipher only part of it, another part you can but erase or strike out and fill with content of your own.

A ghastly law?  – No – it is a magnificent law. It makes each child of yours the first link in an immortal chain of generations. Seek in that stranger that is your child the dormant particle of yourself. Perhaps you will perceive it, perhaps you will even develop it.

Child and infinity.

 

Child and eternity

Child – a speck in space.

Child – an instant in time

 

4.  How, when, how much - why?

I am presentiment of many questions awaiting answers, of doubts seeking explanation. And my answer is: "I do not know."

Each time you put aside a book to spin the thread of your own thoughts, it means that the book has served its purpose. Whenever you skim over the pages, seeking rules and ready prescriptions, frowing at their paucity - you should know that if you do find counsels and indications, that this has happened not only despite but even against the writer's will. I do not know, and cannot possibly tell, how parents unknown to me can rear a child likewise unknown to me, under conditions unknown to me; I repeat - can rear, not wish to or should rear.

"I do not know" - in the realm of science like an emerging nebula, a nebula of looming new ideas, ever nearer the truth. "I do not know" is to a mind untrained to scientific thinking a tormenting nothingness. 

 

I should like to teach others how to understand and love that wonderful effervescent creative "I do not know" as regards contemporary knowledge of the child replete with dazzling surprise. Let me emphasize that no book, no physician, can replace one's own keen thought, own attentive perception. […]