Parenting & Family Quote by T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence turns causality on its head, giving the unborn a strange agency over the living. By saying the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child, he shifts blame and responsibility away from parents and toward the very life that demands to exist. The phrase carries a teasing paradox: how can someone who does not yet exist bear fault? The answer lies in his metaphoric recasting of desire. When he writes that our unborn children make our flesh itch, the bodily pull of sexuality becomes a summons from the future, a pressure exerted by lives waiting to be realized. Libido, usually framed as an individual impulse, appears as a transgenerational force.

The language of seduction is deliberate. We led our parents on suggests an almost mischievous retroactive complicity; we coaxed them, as if our own eventual existence sent ripples back through time. In doing so, he smuggles metaphysics into biology and gives a moral texture to reproduction. The line also relieves the sting of judgment. Parents are not the sole authors of an act that binds them to fate; they are intermediaries through whom the next generation insists on arrival.

For Lawrence, the idea resonates with his lifelong preoccupations: fatalism, duty, and the uneasy boundary between will and compulsion. Born outside wedlock and painfully aware of the moral codes of his era, he understood how society apportions blame for desire. Reimagining desire as the voice of the not-yet-born lets him question such blame while acknowledging how overpowering the urge can be. The thought also mirrors his broader sensibility in the desert narratives: people swept by forces larger than themselves, yet compelled to act as if they chose. We inherit the itch, then pass it on, both effect and cause in a chain that binds the living to the unborn and the past to a future that keeps calling us into being.