My dog hurt her feet. No wonder: I took her on a long hike on some hot rocks. She usually seems so thick-necked and indestructible that it didn’t occur to me she could be hurt by nature. Civilization, sure, but I do well enough keeping her on the leash and off the chicken bones. This was definitely stupid on my part, and I definitely feel guilty, and she definitely isn’t holding it against me. What interests me about all of this is how it has exposed my aspirations for myself and my dog. I hope this doesn’t come off as a version of the bumper sticker admonishing you to be the person your dog thinks you are (ugh), it’s something a little closer to, I want to be as good a person as my dog is. So what do I mean by that, since I’ve just claimed to be so persuaded by my dog’s animal-ness that I imagined her to be One with Nature? I mean the qualities I admire in my dog are essentially the qualities I want to cultivate in myself: independence, stoicism, freedom from care, consistency, discernment (ok, this one has its limits in dog town), toughness, honesty. The fact that she doesn’t cultivate any of these qualities makes me admire them more, but it shouldn’t. What am I admiring, really, except traits that are as outside of her control as height or foot size are outside ours? Why should the thing that appears good and natural, for want of a better word, be more impressive than the thing that seems good and fought for? Maybe because I thinking fighting for something shows you want it, and wanting things is somehow indecent. Wanting implies dissatisfaction, trouble, jealousy — and yet the dog wants things all the time. It’s just that the things she wants are simple and largely free: fresh air, time to run around, things to smell, things to eat. Maybe the distinction between us (and, really, I hope there is more than one) is that she wants what she wants, but not what anyone else has. She wants without envy. Who wouldn’t be jealous of that?
I’ll end with Walt Whitman, the same passage Sheila Burnford uses for the epigraph to The Incredible Journey:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
–Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,” 32.
