Richard Cohen reflects on just how singularly amazing and extraordinary life is.

The arrival of Layla, at 6 pounds, 6 ounces, shortly before midnight on Aug. 4, was preceded by a good deal of stress and an appropriate amount of panic. She had stopped growing in the womb, and so the decision was made to induce labor, moving up the schedule by four days. Even then, there was a problem and then another, and all sorts of horrible thoughts were suppressed as relatives and other interested parties rushed for airplanes, while here, at Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center, a cool miracle occurred. If you doubt me, you should see her face.

It is one of unsurpassed beauty. It sports a nose that is such perfection it will undoubtedly set the standards for beauty from this day forth. Above the nose and flanking it are eyes -- color still to be determined -- that even by Day 2 are amazingly alert -- curious, kind and intelligent. And capping all this, literally, is a shock of black hair of the sort noticed, generally and anecdotally, at the birth of future Nobel Prize winners of either sex, although not in economics. This, of course, can be looked up in the appropriate medical journals -- or so I am told.

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The first days of Layla's life have been amply documented -- on videotape, on digital devices, on gizmos I could not begin to work. She was photographed at birth, and when she is changed and when she burps. It seems her every move is recorded and then downloaded and then digitized or something and then whisked around the country and the world. Her birth is a grand occurrence, a momentous renaissance of life itself. She is the oblivious center of a very big deal, a total mystery to those who try to interpret her every move. What does she understand? What does she feel? What can she see and what can she hear? She is precisely as we all were once and yet, frustratingly, not a single one of us can remember what we were like at the time. To say we were all once infants is like saying we were once all chipmunks in a previous life. Okay. If you say so.

At the time Layla was born, many important things were happening in this country and around the world. I know that. I know, too, that the birth of a child is commonplace. But this one was as different and unique as all the others, yet another miracle in a world that never gets inured to them -- a happy repository of the feeling that affects us all.

Thank God, someone else to love.