MARK DOTY
Dog Years

When we talk about this unconditional acceptance, we are really describing a fixity of devotion, a deep reliability. The source of this is, in part, the dog’s lack of agency; they really cannot do otherwise than to love us, can they? The contract that we enter into is one that dogs take with ultimate seriousness.

People may choose - often, sadly, do - to abandon them, to relinquish our side of the bargain, but dogs do not regard this as a choice; they intend, one might say, to honor this pact with all their hearts, or perhaps the less anthrocentric way to phrase that would be to say that in part a dog simply is an intention to be with you, to be conjoined.

Thus they are the pattern of fidelity - Fido! - the very template of enduring loyalty, of love without any prospect of abandonment.

MARK DOTY

Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

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And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It’s my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.

MARK DOTY from Dog Years

When we talk about this unconditional acceptance, we are really describing a fixity of devotion, a deep reliability. The source of this is, in part, the dog’s lack of agency; they really cannot do otherwise than to love us, can they? The contract that we enter into is one that dogs take with ultimate seriousness.

People may choose - often, sadly, do - to abandon them, to relinquish our side of the bargain, but dogs do not regard this as a choice; they intend, one might say, to honor this pact with all their hearts, or perhaps the less anthrocentric way to phrase that would be to say that in part a dog simply is an intention to be with you, to be conjoined.

Thus they are the pattern of fidelity - Fido! - the very template of enduring loyalty, of love without any prospect of abandonment.

MARK DOTY from Dog Years

When we talk about this unconditional acceptance, we are really describing a fixity of devotion, a deep reliability. The source of this is, in part, the dog’s lack of agency; they really cannot do otherwise than to love us, can they? The contract that we enter into is one that dogs take with ultimate seriousness.

People may choose - often, sadly, do - to abandon them, to relinquish our side of the bargain, but dogs do not regard this as a choice; they intend, one might say, to honor this pact with all their hearts, or perhaps the less anthrocentric way to phrase that would be to say that in part a dog simply is an intention to be with you, to be conjoined.

Thus they are the pattern of fidelity - Fido! - the very template of enduring loyalty, of love without any prospect of abandonment.