Good evening. Thank you first to the LRB for inviting me here tonight. It is an incredibly intimidating honor.

And thank you to the British Museum for hosting and for all of you for coming on Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day.

I time this out. It's a little bit over an hour, so I hope you'll bear with me. Okay.

People who give birth are often gobsmacked after the fact that this is how everybody got here.

As an abstraction, the idea of growing a human inside your body and giving birth to it is wild to the point of being unimaginable.

As a lived experience that can range from sublime to deadly, it can inspire a sense of passing,

as one friend awaiting the onset of labor recently put it to me beyond the veil.

Writing about the poetry of the First World War, writer and critic James Campbell coined the term combat

Gnosticism to describe the belief that, quote, combat represents a qualitatively separate order

of existence that is difficult, if not impossible, to communicate to anyone who has not undergone

an identical experience. As far as I'm aware, we have no concept of birth

Gnosticism. What we do have is a rich anecdotal literature created by people who have

brought humans into the world in all the myriad ways it is possible to do so. The range of

experiences is staggering, but one thread that often reappears is the sense that one has had a profound and life-altering brush with death.

Quote, I knew only that I had to survive, writes Jane Lazar.

Quote, I pushed hard to get the bastard out, and because pushing is not an urge, it is a demand backed up by all the violence of your body,

turned suddenly into an enemy, has at his command.

Pushing with all my might,

I experienced for a moment what I would feel for hours

with my next child, the certainty that I was dying.

Quote, to let the baby out, writes Maggie Nelson, you have to be willing to go to

pieces, end quote. Quote, if I accomplish nothing else in my life, writes Carol Mesao, just this is

...