The Children of Men

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”

At times, Theo has a calm understanding of the present, but the insight does not comfort him. Instead, the idea that if every moment is “the present,” then this is the only way to experience immortality makes him sardonic, cold, and self-interested. With no way to leave a legacy of himself in the world, Theo creates distance between himself and emotion.

“If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”

Treated as more than humans, Omegas have left humanity behind and retreated into violent lawlessness that sometimes—as in the case of the Painted Faces—looks like bestial regression. Theo is not surprised that children treat them like gods begin to see themselves as beyond responsibility.

“Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.”

The existence of human beings is remarkably insignificant on a universal scale when compared to the existence of species that came before them. The only reason humans believe that they are more important than other animals is because the human brain can experience notions of superiority, with relatively little evidence for the belief.

“Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault.”

Just as parents blame themselves for their children’s struggles, children can take on too much responsibility for the problems of adults. As an only child, Theo always believed that anything bad that befell his parents would be his fault.

“I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”

Theo is deeply self-aware. Throughout the novel, he mourns his loneliness, and he laments that he has never known real love. However, he also knows that he does not usually have the temperament or generosity of spirit that would grant him a satisfying, loving relationship. He could never even muster as much love as he knew he should for his daughter Natalie.

“Like all religious evangelists, she realizes that there is little satisfaction in the contemplation of heaven for oneself if one cannot simultaneously contemplate the horrors of hell for others.”

Theo describes what sets Rosie apart from other evangelists. Most of her contemporaries subscribe to the literal, horrific version of hell, in which its victims endure unimaginable, eternal suffering. However, Rosie’s version of hell is one of endless inconvenience and drudgery. It is less frightening than the Calvinistic hell, but it is still a dreadful vision of eternity.

“There was some dignity and much safety in the self-selected role of spectator, but, faced with some abominations, a man had no option but to step onto the stage.”

After witnessing the Quietus, Theo can no longer remain aloof and safe. Despite his unwillingness to have anyone to depend on him, or to take on responsibility for another's welfare, the Quietus galvanizes him into action—even though his still frames this choice to help as a passive, externally-imposed one, telling himself that “a man had no option” but to intervene.

“Her God provides the occasional overnight customer, but it is the Warden she relies on for the essentials.”

The woman who runs the B&B believes both in God and in Xan. She thanks God for bringing her Theo’s need for lodging, but looks to Xan to save her town and provide her a small apartment when her business fails. God is the provider of miracles, while the government is responsible for the day-to-day necessities that make life actually livable.

“We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.”

In response to Theo’s report on murder at the Quietus, Council member Woolvington opines that death is more isolating event than birth, though he frames both as riddled with loneliness. For Woolvington, this philosophizing is a way to justify the government’s actions: His abstraction of death as a vague concept shields him from contemplating the murder in detail.

“Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”

Carl Inglebach reminds Theo of the critical role that history plays in human aspirations. A knowledge of history—or just the awareness that history exists—is part of what separates the human mind from the consciousness of an animal because humans are the only species that can contemplate the future. In the absence of a future, people many lose a piece of their humanity.

“Almost the whole of modern medical research is dedicated to improving health in old age and extending the human life-span and we get more senility, not less. Extending it for what? We give them drugs to improve short-term memory, drugs to raise mood, drugs to increase appetite. They don’t need anything to make them sleep, that’s all they seem to do. What, I wonder, goes on in those senile minds during those long periods of half-consciousness? Memories, I suppose, prayers.”

Xan does not see the point of modern medicine. He does not understand why extending lives of drudgery, senility, and failing faculties should be a priority. Without a reason to live, it is cruel to extend life unnecessarily—another justification allowing the Council to embrace the rationality of the Quietus.

“How can there be dignity if we care so little for the dignity of others?”

Julian is frustrated with Xan’s unnecessarily cruel refusal to grant more rights to the Sojourners. There is no obvious reason for the Sojourners’ unjust treatment—curtail their rights and their ability to travel is mostly just a convenience. For Julian, not caring about one person’s dignity threatens the notion of dignity itself.

“It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air.”

Theo has convinced himself that the evils of the current world would not have existed without the onset of Omega—that before Omega, the UK was on the path to a better, more just society. For Theo, the looming extinction of the species robs concepts like society and compassion of their meaning. This will only change when he meets Julian and learns about the baby.

“It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.”

After visiting Helena, Theo is surprised to realize that he is genuinely happy for her and her new life. Partly this is because her happiness is no longer his responsibility: He is not the one making her happy, but he no longer has to worry about making her unhappy, either.

“We should not, perhaps, assume that nature has a purpose.”

Theo cautions Rawlings about the idea that anything happens for a reason. Nature evolves in ways that ensure the survival of the strongest species, and the obliteration of the weakest. To assume that nature has a purpose, Theo must also accept that the extinction of the human race also has a purpose.

“I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part of the action. It isn’t sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill.”

During the initial questioning at Theo’s home, Rawlings strikes Theo as a classic bully who takes his intimidation where he can get it. This foreshadows the shameful thrill that Theo experiences when he breaks into the elderly couple’s home and ties them to their bed, intoxicated by the thrill of power and domination.

“I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreciate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.”

Even though Theo knows his emotional limitations, he occasionally mourns his inability to love. Theo isn’t even certain that he could recognize love if he experienced it, just as a tone-deaf person might not be able to appreciate the sound of a musical masterwork.

“He had returned to his own city, his own familiar place, yet was revisited by that peculiar and unfamiliar unease which he supposed could only be called loneliness.”

Theo goes to Italy to escape the oppressiveness of his home life. However, his loneliness follows him abroad, giving him no relief. Theo describes his loneliness as a unease, which could mean that he does not exactly understand the feeling.

“Can you understand that, the need to hurt someone because you can no longer love?”

Julian explains her rationale for using Luke. She wanted Rolf to love her more than the cause, and more than their activist group. Because she could not love Rolf, she took it out on Luke in a self-indulgent love affair that harmed them both. Theo, who is acutely aware of his difficulties with love, can empathize.

“Thou turnest man to destruction: again ye sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.”

The title of the book comes from the psalm Theo reads at Luke’s funeral. The verse suggests an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth. God allows men to turn towards their own destruction, but then restarts them on a new path of prosperity, and in this case, fertility. Destruction is inevitable, but so is resilience, giving a small note of optimism for the future world of the novel.

“To what sort of hell are you condemning her? Can you begin to imagine the loneliness of her last years—over twenty appalling, endless years with no hope of ever hearing another live human voice?”

Given his own struggles with loneliness, Theo feels an acute horror at the prospect of Julian’s child having no one left to talk to. Even though the baby is a post-Omega miracle, Theo believes that it might be merciful to spare the baby the endurance required to live like that.

“OK, she’s dead and you feel guilty, and feeling guilt isn’t something you enjoy. Too bad. Get used to it. Why the hell should you escape guilt? It’s part of being human. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

Miriam scolds Theo when his guilt about the old woman’s death threatens to paralyze him. Miriam believes guilt to be an inescapable part of the human condition and suggests that Theo’s guilt is performative and self-indulgent.

“I only know it’s beautiful; she can feel its loveliness”

As Julian looks at the travelers’ joy plant, Theo perceives the plant’s beauty from an intellectual, aesthetic perspective. Julian, however, experiences the plant’s loveliness in a way that Theo cannot. He admires her sensitivity and lack of inhibition.