How to Be a Dog

If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait

all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you

must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one

of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and

low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak,

you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they

will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or

someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to

speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel

you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit,

or placed behind a door—this will depend on what kind of a dog you

want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though

you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn

to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You

must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string,

or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once

you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better

to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not—

a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to

love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much

as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but

never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your

children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity;

you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how

to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk

enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show

your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog,

you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.