Carll’s been explaining sin to me. I mean, really! Dogs don’t know from sin. Why would you? Of the Seven Deadly, gluttony and fornication, for sure, and here and there, wrath and sadness may affect us, but boasting? Greed? Sloth? Dejection (which I guess means hopelessness)? Carll wants me to know why sometimes he calls me “bad” and even thumps me. I get it. He doesn’t like his ankles nibbled, which is Dog for wow-you’re-back-phew-where-in-God’s-name-have-you-been? (Dog with its smaller vocabulary is necessarily more concise than English. Neither would we interject “wow”, “phew”, “in God’s name,” et al. Current demotic English is verbose and unconcise – but that’s the box I checked on the CAI (Canine Artificial Intelligence) translator tool – so that’s what you get. Emoji, of the offered languages, more closely approximates Dog, but Carll wouldn’t hear of it and it’s his fingers keyboarding, not my paws. “You illiterate!” he growls, as if I’d pooped indoors; “Emoji?!” “OK, OK,” I lick him, “lighten up.” Seems I’ve touched a sore point.)
Envy, of these so-called sins, takes the cake. From the others, some satisfaction might be derived, however momentary. Gluttony and fornication in particular strike me as the cat’s pajamas. But envy hurts both giver and receiver – and never ends! You can’t sate it with a good meal or cry. Even dejection dries up eventually if it doesn’t drown itself. (Self-extinguishment is further evidence of humans’ superior intellects.) Envy just keeps gnawing, the way some of us, the underfed (not to boast), keep gnawing used-up bones.
Carll has it (he confesses this to me, sotto voce and entre nous). He loathes it, wrestles it, but there it is. But then Shakespeare had it too, he sighs, as if that were a comfort. Listen!
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least…
These poetry-reading interludes I could do without. Who reads poetry anymore? But just the sound of some poems makes Carll happy so what the hell. Like a whistle home.
“Don’t you have everything you want that can be got – health, love, shelter, good eats, grandkids, not to mention ME! So you’re going to die, who doesn’t. What does Shakespeare have that you haven’t! Why mildew the morning with your moans?” Carll concurs with my hackneyed advice. ”So what if Shakespeare’s more beloved? Is that making him happy now? Can dust smile? ‘Imperious Caesar,’” I remind him,
dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’”
(Two can play this Shakespeare game.)
They’re absurd, these humans, Carll – from what I’ve heard – hardly the worst, fretting themselves with thoughts. I’m an alarmist, too – at least Carll says I am – spooked by shadows and backfiring engines and gunshots from over the hill. Some smells give me the willies, like when a bear’s trudged by in the night. (Yeh, these bears are vegetarians, I’m told – I just don’t want to be their vegetable.) My fears, at least, are real, demonstrable actualities not ineffable notions. Carll grieves – fasten your seatbelt – for what might have been. Now there’s a capacious container that can keep you puling till doomsday if puling is your thing. Might as well grieve for what mightn’t have been, the list’s no shorter.
Oh, I’m Henry, by the way, if you hadn’t guessed.