Summary

In Chapter 1, the narrator is pregnant again. While watching her husband Johannes and her daughter play, she considers her daughter’s “progress towards adulthood,” wishing she could “pull her back” (2).

In 1895, August and Louis Lumière presented “a screening of a selection of their cinematographic films” (2). Meanwhile, in Wurzbug, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen distributed the “first description of the X-ray” (2). When the narrator was last pregnant, she was preoccupied with these events. For months, she and Johannes talked about whether or not to have a child. Terrified “of the irrevocability of birth,” the narrator distracted herself by watching the films and studying the “history of the X-ray” (5).

Over the years, Röntgen struggled to prove himself as an academic. However, after he developed the X-ray, he said little on the subject.

When the narrator was 21, her mother got sick. Although she was responsible...