Three for Friday

Weekend Reading

So, as promised, here are suggestions for our weekend reading, this time with a canine theme.

Poem

Mary Oliver once, wisely, wrote:

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased.

And because she also had a dog called Percy I had to choose one by her.

Percy in his library

THE SWEETNESS OF DOGS

What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. It’s full tonight.So we go

and the moon rises, so beautiful itmakes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself

thinking how grateful I am for the moon’sperfect beauty and also, oh! how richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,leans against me and gazes upinto my face. As though I were just as wonderfulas the perfect moon.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/11/12/mary-oliver-dog-songs/

And another just because:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/519484-percy-wakes-me-fourteen-percy-wakes-me-and-i-am

Story

Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog” in which the “Dog” examines his own consciousness:

"How long will you be able to endure the fact that the world of dogs, as your researches make more and more evident, is pledged to silence and always will be? How long will you be able to endure it?" That is the real great question of my life, before which all smaller ones sink into insignificance; it is put to myself alone and concerns no one else.

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/humor/1922-kafka-investigationsofadog.pdf

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Percy found us in a bluebell wood

Essay

Adam Gopnik’s ‘Dog Days’ is an excellent account of the evolution of our relationship with dogs, and how they adopted us :

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/dog-days-8

For a longer read if you’re so inclined:

In an unusual departure from her fiction and journals, Virginia Woolf wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Flush, which became a meditation on the domestication of animals and women.

https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/flush

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on the role of the dogs in these and any other works you care to mention.  

And lest you think this newsletter is going to turn terminally cutesy next time out there won’t be a dog in sight!

Happy weekend!