It is darkly comical that a man is able to endure the hardships, degradations and finitude of his life only in so far as he possesses the infinite in the form of the baby, as represented by a Blondie, or a Lucy. This is a perversion of man's archetypal relation to the infinite.
 
A man's true infinite is not the baby, nor any modality of the feminine for that matter. Traditionally, a man sought the infinite and eternal in the form of the moral life, the Logos, the "law of God," which is also an expression of the formal, or identity, criterion of reality. Woman, for him, was matter to be possessed and informed. We shall have more to say about traditional marriages, and their problematics, in Chapter Eight.
 
Historically, the problems encountered in the attempt to know and perform man's duty, and in the struggle to find the infinite through the moral law, led to the collapse of masculine images of reality. What happened is that form became severed from infinitude, which led to the emergence of feminine images of reality; hence the baby, and other images of the feminine.
 
It is not only the young man who seeks the baby. The middle-aged man may also be drawn to the innocent girl. The world-weary Faust had an affair with the ingenue, Margarette. Faust is like a vampire hungering to suck the life energies of innocence. Similarly, in Ingmar Bergman's film, Wild Strawberries (1957), an old man seeks the "wild strawberries" of a young woman.
 
A man may want the baby, not to compensate for entering the world as a responsible adult, but to replenish his life energies, dried out by a lifetime of self-reflection. He longs to possess his lost immediacy. Such a man is lost wandering amid the throat-parching sands of the immense desert of the spirit's journey. He thirsts for the waters of self-renewal, and by seeking a young girl, squanders his energy pursuing a mirage. She is a mere image of innocence, because in truth her consciousness is as troubled as anyone's by the contradictions involved in the quest to be. What appears untroubled to a person looking at her, she experiences as a dark chaos. The immediate person is further from the freedom that comes from Self-realization than is the person who has become self-reflective, and who is fully saddled with the weight of life's perplexing questions.
 
Sometimes the middle-aged man who hankers after the baby is not a profound seeker like Faust. He may be merely the "sugar daddy," whose driven materialist nature has caused him to "gain the world, but lose his soul." The baby is the undeveloped soul that he has lost, the childhood innocence that he left behind, which for Citizen Kane was his "Rosebud."