Last night my child was born — a very strong boy, with large black eyes. If you ever become a father, I think the strangest and strongest sensation of your life will be hearing for the first time the thin cry of your own child. For a moment you have the strange feeling of being double; but there is something more, quite impossible to analyze — perhaps the echo in a man’s heart of all sensations felt by all the fathers and mothers at a similar instant in the past. It is a very tender, but also a very ghostly feeling.
When a man has a child and loves it, the whole universe changes and nothing ever seems exactly as it seemed before.
Hearn, L. , “The Letters of Lafcadio Hearn,” 1906. (adapted).
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