A child is born. So, is this the end of cynicism?

It was “the day life paused and then, suddenly, reset on an entirely new plane of being”.

The day my son was born, shortly before the end of autumn, a colleague sent me a kind note welcoming me to fatherhood. “It’s the beginning of a hair-raising journey,” he wrote, “but in my experience, kids give more than they take”.

Below these words he included a link that took me to a blog post written by Nick Cave. The words had recently been published on his website, The Red Hand Files, where the 66-year-old musician invites followers to ask him “anything they like”.

The quality of the questions varies, as do the responses. “Why are you such a massive wanker?” asks one letter writer. “I don’t know,” replies Cave. “Apart from swimming, do you ever wear shorts?” inquires another. There are many such examples, with Cave’s posts moving effortlessly between the profound and the prosaic, the morose and the jubilant.

But the post in question, the one that seemed to latch itself to me and not let go, was a reply to a man named Marius from Niagara County, USA, whose letter read as follows: “My wife and I are expecting a baby boy next week. All the tests are normal, but I seem to swing from terror to euphoria and back again by the minute. Mostly terror. No real question, I just wanted to let you know.”

The Australian musician and writer Nick Cave. Picture: Peter Milne.

Then, the reply.

“Of course, you are oscillating between terror and euphoria,” Cave wrote, “because what you and your wife are about to embark on is perhaps the most substantive course of action two people can take — to bring a baby, that fragile interwork of spirit and atoms, that squalling metaphor of conjugal love, that emissary of hope and potential, that boy of joy, into what is, by any measure, a deeply troubled world.”

In the weeks after Max’s birth, across those early days of faltering misperception and bleary strangeness, I returned to these words, again and again, trying to make sense of them, trying to put my finger on exactly why they had struck as such a revelation. I read them to my wife. Then she read them again, too.

I had pretended to read some of the parenting books that appeared on my bookshelves in the months leading up to Max’s birth. But they seemed to follow the same nauseating pattern.

Cave’s approach was different, his perspective almost spiritual.

His words are about clarification more than reassurance, extending a sense of shape and coherence to something that feels disparate, confused, even pre-articulate — as if someone has entered the silences and made them speak for the very first time.

That brilliantly luminous and noble phrase “emissary of hope and potential” reminded me of W.H. Auden’s September I, 1939, and the final stanza in which the poet writes of the “ironic points of light” and the “affirming flame” as twin symbols of hope and defiance against the darkening pall of 20th century Europe.

In troubled times the birth of a newborn comes as one of these ironic points of light, slicing through the sinews of suffering, thrust into an imperfect world where he or she has absolutely no say over the terms of their existence. There is no selection process, no preferences, only the cruel hand of fate moving somewhere behind the scenes.

W.H. Auden walks through a snowstorm in St Mark’s Place, New York, 1960.

So, it is lucky, improbably lucky, that my son has been born here, in Australia, at this time and in these circumstances. That’s not something to scoff at or to take for granted; that’s some serious good fortune. I won’t forget it.

As a newbie to fatherhood, I’m hardly the first to hit upon these revelations. But perhaps it’s good to occasionally remind the veterans among us of that special charge of joy and exuberance that comes when you embrace your own child for the very first time.

I can’t say this was the moment cynicism packed up and shipped out forever. But it was certainly the day life paused and then, suddenly, reset on an entirely new plane of being. Something unbreakable had been made, a natural re-ordering of life’s priorities had taken place. And now, since then, since the birth of baby Max, the weight of all things has felt just that little bit lighter.