A Big Little Life

Up until this past weekend, I had read exactly one book by Dean Koontz. It was a supernatural suspense novel called Whispers, and I read it when I was a young Marine in 1980. The book came into my possession just as I was ending a two-or-three year spree of reading Stephen King novels, and I was growing tired of the genre. Whispers did its work with me — it kept me up late into the night reading, and later kept me awake listening to the night sounds and thinking about the world Koontz had created. But I assumed that Mr. Koontz was treading the same ground King had already mapped out, and so when I finished the book, I never picked up another of his works.

Until a few days ago.

A series of what most would call coincidences or happy accidents took place on Thursday and Friday, leading me to do a bit of research at our small-town library. While at the library, I picked up a nonfiction work by Dean Koontz called A Big Little Life, and my weekend took a hard right turn.

I won’t attempt to review the book because I don’t think reviews are my strong suit. What I will do is share here some portions of the book that affected me. After reading this book and also after watching an interview with Mr. Koontz, I have developed a budding respect for him. A Big Little Life is not the typical pet memoir, the “My dog was so special and I loved her so much and she brought so much joy into my life and it just about killed me when I lost her” type. Even a ham & egg hack like me could easily dash off this kind of memoir. No, this book was much, much deeper material, a type of alluvium of the soul, the sandy and polished reflections deposited by the running water of tears and laughter and contemplation.

Mr. Koontz explores, over and over again, the concept of mystery…mystery in the theological sense of something we do not understand. He uses his years with Trixie,  his Golden Retriever, to illuminate the questions some of us ask, and the elusive answers to those questions. It’s a masterful work, this book. After reading the last page, I wiped my eyes and said to my wife, “I feel as if I’ve just read a holy book.”

Here are some of the passages that impelled me to decide to buy the book:

On that January night, because Trixie had been an undiluted joy during the previous four months and had already been a force for positive change in me, I said, “You’re not just a dog. You can’t fool me. I know what you really are.”

As if in response, she raised her head, eased back slightly, and regarded me with what might have been concern. Golden retrievers have versatile brow muscles that allow them a wide range of facial expressions. She never before responded to me in this fashion, and I was amused to interpret her look as meaning, Uh-oh, somehow I’ve blown my cover.

“You’re really an angel,” I continued.

To my surprise, she scrambled to her feet as if in alarm, ran down the hall, turned, and stared back at me. Muscles tensed, legs spread for maximum balance, head lifted, ears raised as much as a golden can raise them, she seemed to be waiting for what I might say next.

I”m seldom speechless. Trixie’s behavior, which seemed to be a reaction to my words, as if she understood every one of them, raised the fine hairs on the nape of my neck and left me mute.

Intrigued, I got to my knees, wondering what she would do next, but she continued to watch me intently when I rose to my feet.

For a minute or two we studied each other from a distance of twenty feet, as though we both expected something of consequence to happen. Her tail did not wag. It wasn’t lowered as it would have been if she had been the least fearful. It was a perfect plume, as still as if she had stepped outside of time, where nothing could move her or even one hair upon her, nothing except her own will.

“Trixie?” I finally asked, and when I spoke, she retreated another ten or fifteen feet and turned again to face me in the same expectant stance as before…

….this was the first and last time she wanted distance from me. As we stared at each other, I began to realize that regardless of what Trixie’s behavior implied, if it implied anything at all, I should not pursue this matter further if only because it disturbed her. Besides, I was dealing here with the ineffable, the pursuit of which offers endless frustration but no reward other than the thrill of the chase.

I sat on the hallway floor, my back to the wall, legs straight in front of me, and I closed my eyes. The nape of my neck tingled for a while, but when the fine hairs stopped quivering, Trixie returned to me. She snuggled against my side. Putting her head in my lap, she allowed me to rub gently behind her ears and stroke her face…

I write fiction for a living. I could spin a score of intriguing scenarios out of this one spooky moment with Trixie, but none would be as strange as the truth, if it could be known in this instance. Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees, reminding us that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations.

Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality into paper-thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp, and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea, in all its immensity, cannot be embodied in one tide-washed pebble.

and

When we write a novel, concoct a new political system, devise a theory to explain the workings of the human mind or the evolution of the universe — we are fictioneers, bleaching the rich narrative of reality into a pale story that we can better comprehend. We go wrong when we don’t admit the unknowable complexity of reality, but we go dangerously wrong when we claim that one pale story — or an anthology of them — is truth. We arrive at the paleness to avoid consideration of the daunting truth in all its fierce color and infinite detail.

and

In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary. If we allow ourselves to be humbled by what we do not and cannot know, in our humility we are exalted. If we allow ourselves to recognize the mystery and the wonder of existence, our fogged minds clear. Thinking clearly, we follow wonder to awe, and in a state of awe, we are as close to true wisdom as we will ever be.

Trixie was innocent and joyful, but also at times enigmatic and solemn. I learned as much from this good dog as form all my years in school.

and

Scientists and animal behaviorists. have written libraries full of nonsense about the emotions of dogs, suggesting that they do not have emotions as we know them, or that their exhibitions that appear to be emotionally based do not mean what we interpret them to mean in our sentimental determination to see a fellowship between humanity and canines. 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.

As anyone who has ever opened his heart and mind to a dog knows, these creatures have emotions very like our own. The usual arguments against this truth are, by their convoluted nature and by the hidebound materialism that informs them, revealed as sophistry or, worse, as the dogmatic insistence of science that is in fact scientism.

and

Dogs eat with gusto, play with exuberance, work happily when given the opportunity, surrender themselves to the wonder and the mystery of their world, and love extravagantly. Envy infects the human heart; if we envy, next we covet, and 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.

and

When I say that Trixie restored my sense of wonder, you might be curious to know what had happened to it. Life had happened to it.

My mother, a good person with a kind heart, had died after much suffering at the age of fifty-three. Your sense of wonder relies in part on your perception that this world is founded on a system of natural law that is not only binding on humanity but that is expressed at least as often as not in the story of every life, in the choices people make and in the consequences thereof, a natural law that is like an awesome machine turning the gears of the world, a machine that is hidden under the surfaces of all things but it thrillingly revealed in occasional transcendent moments. My mother lived with faith and right reason, yearning for order, but reaped disorder and an early death. My father, an apostle of disorder, had a long life full of the pleasures of the flesh that he prized, using and deceiving and betraying and defrauding people as a matter of routine, yet always escaping the punishment of the courts and the cosmos. The beautiful machine of natural law, of which I hoped to have a glimpse, remained hidden from me for a long time…

….[then I received from life] four revelations: First, I arrived at the certainty that Trixie possessed a soul as real as mine…by Trixie’s intelligence, by her sense of wonder, she revealed a seeking soul — and led me to a reconsideration not only of the mystery of life but of the mystery of my own soul and destiny…

My second revelation was the recognition of the unblemished innocence of her soul compared to mine or to that of any human being. She didn’t need a new Ferrari or a week in Vegas to know joy. For her, bliss was a belly rub, a walk on a sunny day — or in the rain, for that matter — an extra cookie when it wasn’t expected, a cuddle, a kind word. She lived to love and to receive love, which is the condition of angels [ emphasis mine ~ SKO].

Third, I understood that the joy arising from innocence, from harmony with nature and natural law, must be the most exhilarating feeling either dog or human could hope to experience. Dogs’ joy is directly related to the fact that they do not deceive, do not betray, and do not covet. Innocence is the condition of deepest bliss.

Fourth, I came to realize that the flight from innocence so characteristic of our time is a leap into absurdity and insanity. If [Koontz’s wife] Gerda and I had decided to delay accepting a dog from CCI and later received another golden, instead of Trixie, or if we’d decided not ever to have a dog, I wonder who I would be these eleven years later. Whatever Dean Koontz I would be, I would not be the Dean Koontz I am now. Considering the potentially momentous nature of even the smallest decisions we make, we ought to be terrified and humbled, we ought to be filled with gratitude for every grace we receive.

and

Current theory claims that dogs are unaware they will die. Theory does not deserve respect when it conflicts with out intuition and common sense, which are native to the mind and fundamental to sanity [emphasis mine ~ SKO].  We might take comfort in this claim that dogs are unaware of their mortality because it lifts from dogs the fundamental fear with which we must live. But it’s a false comfort, as anyone knows who has loved and been loved by a dog, and who has not surrendered his common sense.

Worse, in believing such a thing, we rob dogs of the profoundly moving stoicism that gives them immense dignity. When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster….

…In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying Pompeii, burying it under volcanic ash. Centuries later, excavators discovered a dog, Delta, whose collar described how he had saved his owner’s life three times. Delta’s body was lying over a child he had tried to protect from the volcanic horror.

If dogs were incapable of grasping the concept of mortality, they would make no effort to save us from death. If they understand that we are mortal, they surely know the same about themselves.

Skeptics have a reason for wanting to deny that dogs are aware of their mortality. Such an awareness, like an accurate awareness of time and its role in our lives, is a higher order of thinking than mere instinct, which is only pattern programming. Yet because dogs are acutely aware of death before they witness it, the concept has not been learned. Therefore, the knowledge is native to their minds, and we call such knowledge intuition.

[Elite intellectuals]…are hostile to intuition because, as thousands of years of civilization will attest, we are born with a tao, a code of virtuous conduct, a sense of right and wrong, which is ours intuitively. This tao, which we all share, is the foundation of every great religion but also of every great culture that has ever given its people long periods of peace and stability under law, and also of every rational humanitarian impulse and project. If we recognize the existence of this tao, we cannot believe that life is meaningless, and we cannot succumb to nihilism or to cold materialism. If we recognize this tao, we may well accept the existence of the soul, whereafter we will not cooperate with those intellectuals who, in the modern age, have been in mad rebellion against all of human history that preceded them.

When we acknowledge that dogs are well aware of their and our mortality, we acknowledge they have intuition. From the skeptic’s point of view, this is dangerous because it inspires us to regard our dogs with greater enlightenment, whereupon we may see that dogs, by intuition, also have a tao…if our dogs have a tao, we must have one, too, because dogs would not love us so much if we were nothing but meat machines without principles or purpose. Like human beings, dogs can be imperfect judges of characters, but they can’t be wrong about all of us.

Most of us will never be able to live with as much joy as a dog brings to every moment of his day. But if we recognize that we share a tao, we then see that the dog lives closer to that code than we do, and 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. The first step toward greater 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.

and

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointments of life, the injustices, the battering events that are beyond our control, and the betrayals that we endure from those we befriended and loved can make us cynical and turn our hearts into flint on which only the matches of anger and bitterness can be struck into flame. Other companion animals can make us more human, but because of the unique nature of dogs — their clear delight in being with us, the rejoicing with which they greet us when we come home to them, the reliable sunniness of their disposition, the joy they bring to playtime, the curiosity and wonder with which they embrace each new experience — they can melt away cynicism and sweeten a bitter heart.

And finally, at the end of the book after describing Trixie’s death and his grieving for her…

Being there for her and knowing that she took courage from us, we fulfilled the promise that dog lovers make to their dogs — I will always love you and bring you safely through troubled times — and little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.

Yes, this was a deeply spiritual book. A holy book, if you will. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

~ S.K. Orr