I thought this description of Dr. Zhivago's wife after she had delivered their first child was a beautiful picture of birth.
"Squirming on the palm of the nurse's hand lay a tender squealing, tiny human creature, stretching and contracting like a dark red piece of rubber....Tonia lay exhausted in the cloud of her spent pain. To Yurii Andreievich she seemed like a barque lying at rest in the middle of a harbor after putting in and being unloaded, a barque that plied between an unknown country and the continent of life across the waters of death with a cargo of immigrant new souls. One such soul had just been landed, and the ship now lay at anchor, relaxed, its flanks unburdened and empty. The whole of her was resting, her strained masts and hull, and her memory washed clean of the image of the other shore, the crossing and landing."
- from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
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| Baby Walter, 19 November 2013 |
