[Oct 27] Dogs and cats are among the most beloved pets. Cats are undoubtedly adorable, but dogs, people say, are more loyal, as they love their owner unconditionally and foolishly, even if the owner beats it or lets it starve, as we sometimes learn in the news.
I have this friend Joan, who now lives by herself, and she wants to have a dog as a company. She had a tense relation with her parents, and she recalled that, this year on her birthday, “my mother wished me a happier life I ought to enjoy in the prime of my life.” She was moved. And later she regretted having been moved.
It reminds me of “Deep-holes”, a short story by Alice Munro. [Spoilers below] There is this son Kent, and the father Alex, a geologist, and the mother Sally. Once as the family went with the father to wildness to collect stone specimens, Kent fell into a cave, and the father helped him out. The kid broke the leg, recovered, and remained slightly but permanently injured. Once, the father said that he saved Kent not due to love, but to familial duty, indicating that they were not close.
When he was in college, Kent disappeared and stopped contact. Years passed, and Alex died. One day, Sally saw on TV that Kent volunteered as a firefighter. She met him, and it turned out he was living a Bohemian lifestyle, together with a community of the homeless, who volunteered to help local people. Kent told her of his anguish, that he derived no joy in helping people, but merely felt that he was obliged to do so.
The question plagued the short story, that why Kent left his parents and desired such a life. I got it when I reread. Because Kent remained feeling indebted to Alex’s favor. The parents are the world of the baby, while the baby is but a negligible bit of the parents. It is terrifying to have been born, if we must suffer such an unfair position.
Or Alex may be God, and Kent be Christ. It is more distressing than fortunate — to continue the allegory — to be saved by Christ, because we ought to “take his yoke upon him and learn from him”, as Christ resolved to be crucified. And what grave responsibility that is.
Thus I am afraid to have a dog. I hug it, I imagine, and it will have the amorous look on my face, yearning and innocent, like I am some immaculate deity. But I am not. I am sinned. It is not that I will not tend it properly. No, I would walk it well, feed it well, “out of duty”, but what if I will not love it, and what if, still, it continues to turn back and gaze at me.
We can do nothing but continue the stifling daily life, by having mercy on those whom we cannot love, and being enslaved by those who do not love. I may not be a father nor a Christian, I gather, but will remain alone, and will not keep a dog.
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