Last year, I read a short story that truly changed my perspective as a writer and as a human. It was Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly,” and lately, I’ve found myself revisiting its profound words. Upon reading Foer’s piece the first time around, I reached a fundamental awareness that we are simply complex beings. “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” recognized the veracity in the fact that every judgment we make concerning everything we say and do—or do not say and do—has a pronounced domino effect on not just on our own existences, but also on those of everyone surrounding us. The status of the present for each one of us echoes the totality of every action that has ever taken place. It’s odd to consider every lifespan, or every moment, just a mathematical statistic, but the core of our existences is in essence parallel to an intangible decision tree with limitless branches. Every instant has its set of possibilities and then an actual outcome, whether we are content with that end result or not. Every point in time has the opportunity to be everything that it is not. As Foer wrote it in this thought-provoking piece, the reservations that overshadow our lives often stem from the question, “Everything else happened—why not the things that could have?”
As Foer wanders through the monotonously frenetic lives of a man and his wife, a game-changing event took place in the plot when the main couple was blessed with their first and only child. From that point on, each habit, each task, and each moment turned into definitive memories that manage to find their distinctive locations in a household, making the reader feel as if the central characters merely drift through their lives as the major events float by. Viewing the couple from a psychoanalytical angle, Foer puts forth his own deliberations and notions through these modest, but highly significant, ruminations of a vital period in the primary character’s lifespan: the process of bringing up a family.
This newborn infant truly initiates a crossroads in Foer’s piece that must have been an event that he thoughtfully inserted importance into. Symbolically, a baby signifies the best kind of new beginning, defined by innocence, comfort, warmth, and openness. However, after the birth of the child, the couple faced change, and they were challenged to cope with it. A new dynamic had rearranged their lives. “I Googled questions that I couldn’t ask you or doctors,” stated the puzzled father. Suddenly, life wasn’t entirely mapped out, and it had to be handled in a flexible and creative way.
Notably, one thought-provoking line gives meaning to a lingering concept that is threaded through the story: “I was never afraid of rolling over onto him in my sleep, but I awoke many nights sure that he was underwater on the floor.” Actually, according to an online dream reader, dreaming that an infant is being bathed in water indicates regression: lapsing back to a point in life when you had no anxieties or restraints. Foer seems to be implying that the man’s history was teasing him with memories of how life was before his child turned his whole world upside down. Suddenly, he was not in his comfort zone, and he was overcome with fear. Fear stemmed from the many characteristics of family life that he still had to become acquainted with. Between the lines, a reader can certainly see that he was tentative and highly anxious about what is to come.
Another striking sentence in “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” is the short but sweet line, “You loved tiny socks.” Foer commendably places genuine depth within this phrase. The narrator was referring to the wife’s joy derived for her baby’s miniature articles of clothing. There is actual research indicating that baby clothes are emblematic of diversion from earlier ways of thinking and from old conventions. The wife was, in a way, coming to terms with this shift in her own life.
Furthermore, the narrator later observes, “You were not depressed, but you were unhappy.” A parallel is drawn between the wife’s emotions toward her new lifestyle and those of the husband. This highlights that while they both love their son unconditionally, they fear that they cannot ensure that the future will be perfect all of the time. This is a concern that many parents can appreciate.
Then, the baby inevitably grew up before their eyes. “He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned. One night I couldn’t help him with his math. He got married.” Foer artfully depicts time flying by through the style of his writing. The reader truly feels the shock and the loss as the child leaves the nest.
The last, as well as the most hypnotizing thought conveyed in “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly,” is that the clock continues to tick behind the scenes while we are attempting to live our lives, and that we are each continually evolving with each moment. Ostensibly trivial minutes sum up to months, years, decades. Abruptly, we are elderly and we are confused about how it happened. There are no do-overs in this short life; there is never an option to turn the clock back and start over, no matter how many disappointments we have with how we turned out. For most of us, it can be challenging to look back and not experience regrets. With hindsight, alternate choices often seem evidently preferable. All we can do is reach for a one in a million shot at life, look at the bright side of the result, and move forward. To quote the brief, but predominant line in the final paragraph of the story, “No explaining or mending.” In the end, the only thing we can do is be.