Brain Food #828: What we can learn from dogs
The art of joy and indifference
Thoughts of the day
Sometimes you discover a book or decide to revisit it at the right time, and this was the case for me and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, nearly twenty years after the first time I read its pages. Perhaps we revisit books, or films, or songs, because of their familiarity, or because somewhere in our subconscious there are themes that follow the thread of our lives, and something we feel but do not yet know might be lying along the way, the dramatic irony of our own lives.
The most lovable character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel filled with characters carrying familiar flaws, is Karenin the dog. What can we learn from dogs? Some lessons from Milan Kundera.
To face each day with wonder:
“Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed.”
To reduce the weight of the expectations and responsibility we place on others:
“It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.”
To see stillness as a gift:
“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”
The security and comfort we can feel in the company of another come from a lack of pretense or ambiguity. Dogs do not disguise their love, nor are they afraid of showing it. They teach us the art of joy and indifference, despite our all too human troubles, our falls from grace.
What can we learn from dogs? That the least we can do is to love them back.
Paul Gauguin often included dogs in his paintings, such as in Arearea, inspired by his trip to Tahiti. While some women are performing human rituals, praising a statue of a god in the background, and two more women sit still and pensive, alone in each other’s company, our attention is drawn to the dog, blazing red, collarless, following a scent and unaffected by its surroundings, and thus free. In its presence, all human rites and troubles are diminished. As Mary Oliver wrote, “A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”
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