Welcome to the Art of Accommodation, introductory lecture. (There are still seats in the back – and a couple in the balcony.) Surprising, the turnout. Most years – but this year’s different, I suppose.

I’m Henry, by the by – a dog, as you may have discerned. My translator is the fat old guy over there, rendering my crisp clear lexicon into a pompous polysyllabic prose, reminiscent of the overlarded, self-gratulatory diction of the late Victorian era, when self-pleased aesthetes deployed three long Latinate words where one snappy Anglo-Saxon monosyllable would suffice, Pater-patter call it. I applied for someone better, but Dog is not a tenure-track posting at ______ University, especially after the calamitous cancellation of federal research grants, a subject about which I am blissfully clueless.

Dogs are often tapped to teach this course because we know something about it while humans – how to put this politely? – know less. Indeed, it’s humans’ ignorance that lands this course in the catalogue. For most dogs, accommodation is second nature. They know without being taught how to eye, sniff, acknowledge, cavort or steer clear. Our species’ few savage haters have been bred to intimidate by thuggish overlords. (Dobermans and Pitbulls can be most amiable companions, if considerately trained.)

The verb accommodate derives, as you no doubt know, from the Latin word meaning to fit or fasten. It effloresced in the Romance languages into cozy cognates like “commodious,” and the less cushiony but more practicable “commode.” You may wonder what truck a dog has with etymology: ask Carll (that’s the guy translating). He insists I would have known such things had I been born human, God forbid.

The most vivid way to conceptualize accommodation is to recall one of those waddlers in the supermarket, who are inevitably getting in one’s way. It’s not that they’re necessarily broader than other shoppers, just that they blob in the direction one means to pass and when you veer to pass on the opposite side, they’ve blobbed there too, oblivious to your inconvenience. Dogs are not actually permitted in supermarkets – all except service dogs, which I’m not technically – but Carll says this analogy will “resonate,” so what the hell.

Accommodation is an art, because it depends upon instinct, some might argue genius, which cannot be taught. To accommodate one needs to sense the presence, intention, direction, and momentum of other creatures, what they’re up to, and how you might most agreeably relate. It accepts others for what they are and refrains from rebuking them for what they’re not. Instead of having its way, it makes way – with no loss of selfhood, a concept foreign to dogs. Dogs don’t have selves because they don’t have words, which necessarily discriminate, igniting discussions of better and worse. We’ll explore how the dictionary gives rise to acrimony. We’ll also probe the difference between “manners,” that is, the codification of accommodation, and the real deal. Sometimes the stiffest manners are the least accommodating.

Lectures four through eight will focus on accommodation in art – especially literature. Which writers are most aware of their readers? Which carry on indifferent to their auditors’ ordeal? The Sermon on the Mount, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson will illuminate the media sacra here and James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Walter Pater (!) the vile. Lectures on the politics of accommodation will touch on race and gender cruelty – how humans get infected, how they might be cured. An entire lecture will be devoted to a single individual, the late great Pope Francis, almost canine in his compassion, and the saint he’s named for, an aces poet.

Until then.