If I were to state one reason I like pets, it’s that they put us in contact with the unknown. There’s a silence that wraps around a cat or a dog that cannot be sufficiently filled. While I was walking my friend’s greyhound recently, for example, the dog stared at a car for five minutes. Then it stared at another car for another few minutes. Try as I might, I couldn’t tug it away. Why? I have no idea. I will never know. We have no answer to things like this. We keep talking and talking at dogs and find no respite. You can say to the dog, “That’s a nice car, huh? You really like it? It’s your be all and end all? This car is, like, the eternal now?” But all you’ll get back is a curious stare that could mean almost anything.
We keep talking and talking at pets, sometimes in a baby voice, as if that will help. And they never respond. We write movies like The Secret Life of Pets and Strays and All Dogs Go To Heaven, hoping to pin down what is happening in that vast silence of the pets’ consciousness. But we know this is intrinsically silly. That’s one of the best things about talking to pets—it’s coded as obviously ridiculous.
This is similar to how we write voluminously about our lives, though, isn’t it? And yet we often take that act deathly seriously. We wrap language around everything in the world—the act of making love, the shadows in the trees, the scent of bergamot oil—and the world gives us nothing back. We try to treat it as our pet, and it provides us nothing in return. Maybe a curious stare? Or maybe not even that?
It’s worthwhile to note here that I don’t think anything I’m saying in this essay is particularly true. Or, it isn’t true in the sense that there’s really anything backing it up. It’s a word game. You are reading this essay—or not—because you enjoy, or don’t, the feeling instilled in you from reading the series of words I’ve put down on paper. In terms of truth value, it isn’t the same as if I were to tell you that the combined efforts to cut hydrofluorocarbons from AC units worldwide might reduce climate change by half a degree.
That’s true. This is not.
The problem is that some writers are secretly narcissists. They fall for the power of their own tastes, believing they’ve stumbled onto some transcendent truth when they’ve really just stumbled into a persuasive game. If pessimism is the form in which they enjoy writing, for instance, then pessimism might very well seem like the only reasonable way to approach the universe. Writing is the outlet where they can safely project their particular sensibilities onto the rest of the world without, say, becoming the dictator of a small country. (Is this true, though? Or am I just extending my own narcissism into a realm of people who I don’t actually know, who I haven’t surveyed or even reached out to? Why am I saying any of this if it isn’t attached to anything in reality? Is this useful? Why do I keep talking like this? Would it be better if it were done in a baby voice? Or if I said it while squeaking a toy?)
Jonathan Franzen. That’s someone who takes writing deathly seriously. Years ago, he wrote an essay for The New Yorker arguing that there was really nothing to be done about climate change—essentially, that we should all give up and cling to some small token of the world that we wish to preserve. Strawberries, he said, were his little artifact to save from the Holocene. It’s an intriguing sentiment. Or at least, it seemed intriguing until scientists responded, noting that what Franzen was saying was not only inaccurate, but actively harmful, denying the reality that every slight degree of warming prevented does indeed have a massive effect at reducing human suffering. Again, he was playing a word game with what felt right in his mind, projecting the metaphor inside his psyche—the red strawberries he loved—onto the indifferent universe, as if it were something of intergalactic importance.
And yet we want to see the importance of our own tastes, don’t we? We stand in front of the painting, the lover, the blank monolith of our own life, and they can seem as enormous as supernovas, as elemental as the Big Bang. There has to be a reason for that feeling, right? Some deeper justification then for why we’re drawn magnetically to one thing and not another? So we try to sort out what, objectively, is good about them. For example, I like dogs. I also like cats. But more than anything I like having a transcendent case for why those animals strike my fancy. So I wrap language around that feeling until it seems, definitively, like I’m standing on solid ground. And then I resolutely try not to look down.
The truthful thing here would be to just say none of this stuff matters: The musing on our favorite music, the sizing up of pets, the explanations for taste. But it does matter in a sense, doesn’t it? You tell me: You’ve read this thing to the end. Does it matter to you what I’ve said? Even a little? I hope so. I’m fairly certain it matters to me. And that only becomes a problem when I mistake the edge of my skull for the end of the universe, when I start seeing aesthetics and word games as good stand-ins for the real stakes of human life. The best thing, then, would be for an essay such as this to be like something spoken to a curious but noncomprehending dog.
The best thing would be for its words to simply burn off like mist in the morning sun.
