The howlistic view (original) (raw)
March 6 2012, 16:52
Dear Mischa,
You know that I love you.
I love you in each of your component parts. Your handsome chunky snout, so good to stroke between two palms. Your endlessly thick-pelted and scrufflable throat. Your warm brown eyes with their many thoughtful moods, and their tendency to puzzlement. Your tail, expressive in so many ways and angles; and your haunches; so muscular and good to scruffle. Your throat and its panoply of extraordinary harmonic noises. Your light quick panting, which I've clocked at nearly 6 Hz when we've been out in hot weather. Your dignified friendly charm which has all the neighbours eating out of your hand, or, more literally, you out of theirs. Your extravagantly lavish body warmth. Your gorgeous monochrome pelt, with its sudden flash of chocolate-gold highlights when you pass through the sunlight. Your long smooth gait, as sleek and elegant as a Swiss watch. Your scent, delicious beyond measure when I bury my face in your fur and just breathe. Your paws, so handsome and with a curious and pleasant aroma of their own.
You are, in every particular, a lovely dog.
Sometimes, when we're together in some way—lying on the carpet with my arm around you, or out running together in the rain—I realise that I'm marvelling at some particular aspect of you, yet somehow entirely forgetting the whole. "How wonderfully strokeable this haunch is," I think, or "how warm this belly," or "how gloriously energy-efficient it is that a half-curled-up dog can be stroked with a continuous circular motion of the hand."
I may liken you to a Bach fugue. You are composed of many skeins, each lovely in its own right, and each appreciable to the full. Yet your whole is something infinitely more splendid than your component parts, and its loveliness passeth human understanding. One must seek to understand it both in and of itself, and by contemplation of each of its facets. The whole is only learned through the skeins, and the skeins only through the whole; but the more one learns, the more one's heart is enrichened and the more delight unfolds.
In short? Love is at once complicated and very simple, and the reward for love is—more love.
Love,
me.