The Familiar
parva petunt manes The second horizon for human action is the most natural, easier to find than the first. While it might sometimes seem that we are primarily individuals , the autonomous selves recognized in my earlier discussion of the intimate , the family is actually prior to the individual. Prior in time, and more important in terms of culture. If we go back to the most original moments of conception and birth that we experience, when the individual discovers its integrity for the first time, we inevitably find more than just the individual in them. Each individual requires parents, who themselves had parents in turn, and so on. These parents are not null quantities when it comes to the fate of their children. In simplest terms, their diet—the rhythm of life that they express before the birth of their children and thereafter—exerts a potent influence in the life of those children, extending through generations in ways that we are always marking with pregnant language a