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of singular beauty and splendid form, adopted the previous September, is in her fourth month with my wife, Gerda, and me. She is joyful, affectionate, comical, intelligent, remarkably well behaved. She is also more self-possessed and dignified than I had ever realized a dog could be.
We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted.
reminding us that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations.
Our faith tells us that when the last hour comes, the best places to be taken are while in prayer or while engaged in work to which we committed ourselves in cheerful acceptance of the truth that work is the lot of humanity, post Eden. If done with diligence and integrity, work is obedience to divine order, a form of repentance.
We knew that dogs are not well loved if kept largely in the yard, that they are pack animals born to live within a family, and that a dog therefore requires almost as much time as a child.
As any man or woman is not only a man or a woman but is also a spirit corrupted in minor or major ways, so this dog was not only a dog, but also a spirit uncorrupted as no human spirit can be.
Elaine genuinely likes people, and she is sincerely interested in the lives of everyone she meets.
Trixie inspired me to look at things from a new perspective, made the familiar fresh again, somehow shared with me her recognition of great beauty in mundane scenes, and reawakened in me an awareness of the mystery that is woven into the warp and weft of everything we perceive with our five senses but can know only with our hearts. This may be the
to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.
Throughout that four-day weekend, she expected that we would pass her along to yet new people and that she would be leaving her sixth home for her seventh. When we took her back to our house on the hill, she raced up the stairs to the master suite, found her bed where it should have been, found all her toys as she had left them, and realized that she was not being shipped off to a new place after all.
a celebration of the recognition that this was still her home and that we were her family forever.
Like too many specialists in every field, they are educated not out of their ignorance but into ignorance, because they are raised to an imagined state of enlightenment—which is actually dogmatism—where they no longer experience the light of intuition and the fierce brightness of common sense. They see the world through cloudy windows of theory and ideology, which obscure reality. This is why most experts in economics never see the financial disaster coming until the wave breaks over them, why most experts in statecraft and military strategy can be undone by an enemy’s surprise attack.
That night, on our return to the house on the hill, Trixie was declaring, This is where I belong, and was expressing her joy that at last she had a place in the world from which she would not be taken.
Nevertheless, we were directed to the registration desk, where Gerda and I sat opposite a pleasant young woman who would either arrange for my treatment or would transfer me to the boatman who would pole me across the River Styx, depending on how long we needed to fill out all the paperwork.
flair of a magician. He was handsome enough to join the cast of the television show ER, so I knew he must be a
right, not toward the kitchen but into the family room. As we watched, she went from one gift to the next, smelling each of the twenty-one, as if astonished to find that the previous evening had not been a dream and that all these toys were in fact hers. When she checked out the twenty-first and then looked at us, her grin was endearing.
Odd Thomas, who sees the spirits of the lingering dead.
newsletter—Useless News—that
eventually she would publish successful books “edited by” or “as told to” Dean Koontz.
In a pinch, I can with alarming swiftness reason myself into doing the unreasonable,
Heart-friendly and heart-healthy are different things, but it seems to me that anything that lifts the heart can’t be bad for it, though I acknowledge that I’m no cardiologist.
what we covet becomes the object of our all-consuming avarice.
If we live without envy, with the humility and the joyful gratitude of dogs—nachos! ball! cuddle time!—we will be ready even for Death when he comes for us, content that we have made good use of the gift of life.
Gerda never invents or exaggerates. Indeed, sometimes she strips away the colorful details of a story because, though true, they seem to her to detract from the primary facts.
Cynicism can corrode your sense of wonder.
given way to a preference for the comfort of the familiar, when characters are old friends with new names and different wardrobes from those they wore before, when stories follow patterns long established,
resulted in a new understanding of the wisdom of faith and the truth of life’s abiding mystery.
massive novels—Strangers and Dark Rivers of the Heart—which
False Memory, turned out to be the longest book I had written to date, but tighter than the two aforementioned works.
approached False Memory as a comic novel and a suspense novel in equal measure.
First, I arrived at the certainty that Trixie possessed a soul as real as mine.
Nature is never wasteful.
The universe is efficient: Matter becomes energy; energy becomes matter; one form of energy is converted into another; the balance is always changing, but the universe is a closed system from which no particle of matter or wave of energy is ever lost. Nature does not waste, and if intelligent beings by their very nature seek meaning, then there must be meaning to be found.
My second revelation was the recognition of the unblemished innocence of her soul compared to mine or to that of any human being.
She lived to love and to receive love, which is the condition of angels.
Innocence is neither naive nor unhip; innocence is the condition of deepest bliss.
Others write from a moral high ground, which they claim in the name of their religion. They are certain to a fault that God’s grace extends only to human beings, that other living things on this Earth are pretty much like the low-paid extras that fill out crowd scenes in movies.
I suppose they must interpret the biblical admonition that God knows of every sparrow’s death to mean not that He cares for all of His creatures in this fallen world, but instead that He has a worldwide surveillance system so awesome that even Homeland Security could not replicate it.
HAVE OFTEN read and been told that dogs have no sense of time. I don’t believe this, but what I do believe is that the people who say it have no sense, period.
Intuition + common sense = dog wisdom.
Thirty-five years ago, Bonnie Bergin realized that dogs were capable of serving as more than guiding eyes for the blind.
Because for over twenty years I have seen canine intelligence in action at CCI and elsewhere, I have no patience for movies that sell the dog as a dumb, goofy, blundering agent of chaos. Nearly always, the problem is not the dog but the owners who cannot or do not bother to teach it as they would teach a child.
One of the hardest things that I have ever done was maintain my composure through that event, which God helped me to do for more than an hour, until I lost it at the very end.
T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” part of Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end … in my end is my beginning.” I am born to die, but I trust that I die to live again.
gratitude to be among the living, which a lavish spread of food best expresses.
In 1858, a shepherd known as Old Jock was buried in Greyfriars Abbey churchyard, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The next morning, his Skye terrier, Bobby, was found sleeping on his grave. Regardless of the weather, Bobby returned to keep a vigil every day for almost fourteen years. Visitors from around the world came to see this loyal terrier, and a monument to Greyfriars Bobby still stands in Edinburgh. Church officials allowed Bobby to be buried next to Old Jock.
And so dogs mourn not just the immediate loss but also the enduring memory of what was lost.
When dogs risk their own lives to save one of us, they reveal their native knowledge expressed by Saint John in these words: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”
the way to achieving greater joy becomes clear. Loyalty, unfailing love, instant forgiveness, a humble sense of his place in the scheme of things, a sense of wonder—these and other virtues of a dog arise from his innocence.
joy is to stop fleeing from innocence, begin retreating from cynicism and nihilism, and embrace once more the truth that life is mysterious and that it daily offers meaningful wonders for our consideration. Dogs know.
