By the time we had been there five years or so, our life in Ireland had settled into a routine that was both predictable and, from the point of view of my career, profitable. I would wake up in the morning when I felt like it. Then I would go for a run with Brenin and the girls, through the fields and down to the sea. After that I would drive into Cork and take care of whatever teaching commitments, if any, I had. Then I would go to the gym. I’d generally arrive home around 6 and then I would start writing. I’d carry on with this until around 2 a.m.
After Nina had come into the picture, I decided to leave Brenin at home when I went to work. His youthful destructiveness had declined considerably by now. Nina was admittedly doing her best to take up the slack, but even at her worst, her destructive ingenuity and power never really compared to Brenin’s. He wasn’t happy about being left at home, and I did miss his presence in my office and the classroom. Sometimes, in the middle of a lecture, I would look over to the corner of the room, expecting to see him, and suffer a momentary jolt of shock until I remembered he was at home. But I thought it would be very unfair on a young dog like Nina to be left all on her own in the house – especially when she could see Brenin and me driving off in the car. When Tess arrived, however, she was the one who got to keep Nina company and we reverted to the old policy of Brenin accompanying me everywhere.
Tess, being half wolf, was probably about half as destructive as the young Brenin would have been. But that was bad enough. She ate pretty much everything in the house. The valuable antique chairs bequeathed me by my grandmother didn’t last more than a few weeks of her teething. The wall separating the kitchen from the utility room was a dry wall and she ate her way through that in a single afternoon – perhaps in a wholehearted but ultimately futile bid for the freedom of the back garden. She inherited the young Brenin’s fondness for curtains. She also learned quite quickly how to open the cupboards in the kitchen in order to devour their contents – whether they were edible or not made little difference to her. When I put child-proof latches on the cupboards, she ate them too. Finally, she stopped messing around and ate the cupboards themselves. I lost the deeds to the house to one of these afternoon demolitions: Tess ate them. At least, I think it was Tess. Since there were two of them left at home, I could never really apportion blame with any confidence. But either way, I was screwed. I could hardly take the three of them into class with me.
When I got home in the evening, and after I had sifted glumly through the wreckage of the afternoon’s festivities, I would start writing. When I wrote, I would always have a bottle of Jack or Jim or Paddy on the go. And since I would generally write for around eight hours, it wasn’t often that I would remember going to bed. The result was that after five years in Ireland, despite being drunk nearly every night, I had written six or seven books on topics ranging from the nature of the mind and consciousness through the value of nature to the rights of animals. Nor, apparently, were the books complete garbage. To my surprise, they were reviewed in all the good journals. And to my absolute astonishment, almost all the reviews were very positive. Institutions that wouldn’t have touched me with a bargepole when I left Alabama now started to offer me jobs.
Initially, I resisted the idea of moving, since I didn’t want to deprive Brenin and the girls of the countryside they loved so much. Eventually, however – since one extreme to the other seems to be a fairly constant theme in my life – I thought we would try London for a year and see how it went. I took a leave of absence from Cork and accepted an offer from Birkbeck College, University of London.
I was initially a little anxious about the practicalities of the move. Having read the last couple of pages, would you rent your house to me? Me: an alcoholic writer with three feral and hugely destructive canines in tow? You’d have to be mad. So the first rule of renting a house in London when you plan to move in with one and a half wolves and one and a half dogs is obvious: dissemble. ‘Yeah, I have one small dog. Will that be OK?’ It’s not so much lying as the opposite of hyperbole – hypobole, if you like. It’s understatement for effect – the effect being that you actually find someone who will rent their house to you. All right, it is lying. You then follow this up with some casual questions about the domicile of the landlord: ‘Does the landlord live locally? Kenya? Right, I’ll take it!’
So, just before Christmas, I put Brenin and the girls in the Jeep – Brenin and Tess in the back and Nina on the front seat, where she liked to be – and we took the ferry over to Britain, spent Christmas with my parents and drove on to London. Since the rather unfortunate episode with Brenin on Irish Ferries, I had switched allegiance to Stena, largely because they had large wooden kennels to put your dogs in during the voyage. Brenin, however, didn’t like being put in a kennel during the voyage and generally registered his dissatisfaction by demolishing said kennel. Whenever I came down at the end of the crossing, he would invariably be running free over the car deck, to a chorus of yips and howls from the two girls, who had not been able to similarly extricate themselves. Once, a few trips after we had switched allegiance to Stena, I came down at the end of the voyage to find a grateful carpenter working on some of the damaged kennels. He was, apparently, delighted to meet the man who was throwing this extra work his way. And he summarized the overall situation quite accurately, I thought: ‘I don’t know why they don’t allow him upstairs with you – he’s cleaner than half the passengers!’ In any event, as you might gather, I was looking forward to not having to make any more crossings for the foreseeable future. If I had, I’m pretty sure Stena would have banned us anyway.
I’d been over a few weeks previously, leaving Brenin and the girls with my parents for a day, and managed to find a little two-bedroomed cottage just a hop, skip and a jump from Wimbledon Common. I decided that the common’s 1,100 acres of rolling countryside – or 4,000 acres of rolling countryside if you count the adjoining Richmond Park – simply teeming with small furry animals whose entire purpose in life was to be chased, would suit Brenin and the girls down to the ground. And it did.
We would go running on the common early every morning, because I needed to get them exhausted before I dared venture into work, through the alternating woodland and London Scottish golf course – possibly the only golf course in the world where dogs have the right of way. This was an approximately five-mile run, but Brenin and the girls ran at least three times that far. Whenever they saw a squirrel, they would tear off into the woods after it. Indeed, visual contact was not even required. A rustling in the undergrowth was enough to set them off. Happily, those squirrels are fast, and Brenin was slowing down. And neither Nina nor Tess ever really acquired his level of competence at hunting. So the squirrel and rabbit mortality associated with our daily excursion was very low. In fact, in our year there, I think they managed to kill only one squirrel – a level of collateral damage I thought acceptable in light of the immense enjoyment that it gave the three of them. After each chase, they’d bound back up to me, panting, eyes shining, and I’d say to them, ‘Hey, is that any way for the dogs of the man who wrote Animals Like Us to behave!’
By the time we got back to the Jeep, all three of them were wrecked – but especially Brenin, who was now sliding gently from middle into old age. He would sleep most of the rest of the day. Taking him to classes with me wasn’t really an option, since, at his age, I don’t think he would have adjusted easily to the mysteries and vicissitudes of the London Underground. When I left the three of them at home together, I would give each of them a big cooked knucklebone that I’d purchased from the pet shop on the Broadway. This was a partial and temporary, relaxation of their piscetarian diet, driven by the overriding need to save the landlord’s house from annihilation. Over the course of the year, it cost me a fortune – those knucklebones were around a fiver each – but was probably cheaper than buying the landlord a new kitchen. Incredibly, in the year we spent there, the girls did not inflict any damage on the house whatsoever. I had the carpets cleaned when we left and I swear you would not have known that any canines had been in residence. I don’t know if this was because Nina and Tess had matured at just the right time. Or perhaps the knucklebones kept them entertained. Or perhaps Brenin kept them in line. Either way, I didn’t ask any questions and just put it down to being lucky all my life.
So, mercifully, there was no arriving home to the usual tale of destruction or disaster. Once, I did arrive home to a deeply comic scene – which I came to call the night of the three fat dogs. The title was inaccurate, but rolled off the tongue better than the night of the two fat dogs and a fat wolf. It was my fault. At Birkbeck we taught classes only in the evenings. And, after class, I had (uncharacteristically) met a few friends at ULU – the University of London Students’ Union bar – for a couple of quiet pints. I ended up getting the last tube home and arrived at some unspecified time after midnight. The three of them had managed to prise open the door to the pantry, where I kept the dog food. And they had worked their way through most of a twenty-kilogram bag of dry dog food. When I rolled in drunkenly, they tried to perform the usual dance of appeasement and placation – which they performed whenever they knew they had done something I wasn’t going to be happy about. This involved trotting up to me, with their ears back and heads down, their noses low to the ground.And they would wag their tails so exaggeratedly that it was really a body wag rather than a tail wag. Nina and Tess had been dancing this dance for most of their lives, on an almost daily basis. And Brenin himself was not unfamiliar with it. Tonight, however, it was a very different performance – the three of them were simply too fat to carry it off with any conviction. They tried to trot over to me, but could manage only a half-hearted stagger. They tried to perform the usual placatory body wag. But a body wag is a difficult thing to do when your body is as wide it is long – there’s really nothing left to wag. Soon, they gave up and collapsed on the floor. If I was halfway sober, of course, I might have worried whether they had done themselves any permanent damage. But as it was, I just laughed and went to bed. The following morning, I said, ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’, the beginning of our daily ritual that they would respond to by cavorting around the house, howling and occasionally pushing me with their noses to make me go faster. For the first time ever there was no reaction. Heads remained firmly glued to the ground. They briefly lifted their eyes, but only, I think, to beseech me not to make them do anything in their current condition. I think what they were feeling that day was probably the closest thing to a canine hangover; and I could sympathize. So I let them sleep it off that day – not that they would have done the same thing for me if the positions had been reversed.
Jean-Michel was a jolly old man in his mid-sixties. Jean-Michel enjoyed life. He drank too much brandy and he smoked too many cigars. But perhaps his greatest enjoyment in life was fishing – that is how I met him; he used to fish the beach where I lived. When he arrived at work, he was invariably late, and not just a little late – he was always very late. But that didn’t matter so much in the South of France, where tardiness is a way of life. And anyway, the business was his. That business was a veterinary practice in the city of Béziers. That I should have ever met Jean-Michel Audiquet was due to an entirely unexpected, and rather improbable, upturn in my fortunes. But, in the roller-coaster ride that has constituted my life, any such upturn has usually been followed by something rather nasty. This year would be no exception.
First, the good part. London hadn’t really worked, largely due to my being both lazy and antisocial. I would teach my classes, but that was about it. I made no effort to get to know my new colleagues, or even show my face around the university, and quickly acquired the nickname ‘the ghost’. However, I hadn’t entirely misspent my time. While in London, I would split my writing up into two halves. I’d start around 7 p.m. For the first four or five hours I would write serious philosophy. By ‘serious’, I, of course, mean highly technical philosophy that probably only a few hundred people will ever read – in academia, if you can make it to a few thousand readers, you’re a superstar. This is the sort of work that comes out in professional philosophical journals, or books that are published by university presses, such as Oxford, Cambridge and MIT. But for the second half of the evening, after midnight, when the Jack or Jim or Paddy had really started to kick in, I wrote something quite different. The result was a book called The Philosopher at the End of the Universe – an introduction to philosophy through the medium of blockbuster science-fiction films. Those of you who have read it will have no difficulty at all in believing that it was written in various stages of inebriation. However, to everyone’s surprise – most of all that of the publishers – the book sold very well. In fact, money poured in from sales of foreign rights long before the book was even published. And so, not too long after my stint in London was over, I was unexpectedly sitting on a pile of cash – not a huge pile, but enough to keep me going for a while. Having no real idea what to do with it, but being fed up with the incessant rain – I swear it rained every single day I had lived in Ireland – I rented a house in the South of France and thought I would give full-time writing a go. And so we all moved down to a little house in the heart of Languedoc.
The house was on the edge of a village. Bordering it was an absolutely stunning nature reserve made up of the coastal delta of the River Orb. The reserve was part saltwater lagoon: the maïre, as it was called there – an Occitan word synonymous, and roughly homonymous, with the English word ‘mire’. And the area was swarming with the black bulls, white ponies and pink flamingos characteristic of the region. Every morning, we would walk down through the reserve to the beach and go for a swim. I thought Brenin and the girls would take to the French lifestyle, and I wasn’t wrong.
However, a month or so after we moved, Brenin became ill. I’d noticed a general lethargy which started, in hindsight, even before we left London. At first, I put it down to him becoming old. But when he started declining his evening meal, so much so that I had to coax him to eat it, I took him straight to the vet – the only vet, and one of the few people, I knew in France: Jean-Michel Audiquet. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this visit. Jean-Michel didn’t speak a word of English, and in those days my schoolboy French really wasn’t up to the demands of a medical consultation, even if it was only veterinary medicine. But I never imagined there would be anything seriously wrong. I thought he would tell me that Brenin was simply old, and it was hot, and of course he didn’t want to eat as much as before.
Luckily, however, Jean-Michel took his work very seriously. We arrived at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday and he had blood tests done by 11.15. Brenin was under the knife at 11.30. In his examination, Jean-Michel had been able to feel a lump in Brenin’s abdominal area. The lump turned out to be a tumour on his spleen, one that had, he told me, been close to rupturing. He removed Brenin’s spleen – apparently you can live OK without one – and I went home in a state of shock. But incredibly, by the evening, Brenin was back on his feet, if a little unsteadily, and I was able to go back in and bring him home. Jean-Michel told me that he had not been able to see any other signs of cancer and with any luck it would prove to be a primary not secondary tumour. The blood tests would be back in a week or so and we would know more then. I was to take him home, let him rest and bring him back in two days’ time.
With Jean-Michel, you could always tell when the treatment was going well, or at least seemed to be going well, because then he would let himself engage in another of his favourite pastimes: blaguing. French not being one of my strong suits, most things would go straight over the top of my head, and so his jokes at my expense could never afford to be either subtle or clever. He would fix me with a serious stare and say, solemnly, ‘Ce n’est pas bon.’ It’s not good. He would shake his head. But then he would look at me again, break into a broad grin and say, ‘C’est très bon!’ It’s very good! And, of course, because my French was bad, and I was concentrating so hard on processing what he was saying, I would fall for it every time.
It was just after our return, two days after the surgery, that the complications began to appear. I drove back from the vet’s feeling a little happier than I had for a few days. Jean-Michel had been very positive and I was starting to hope that everything might turn out OK. Brenin was ten years old now and I knew he wasn’t going to be around for too much longer. But I wasn’t ready to lose him yet – as if I was ever going to be ready for that. But I was starting to hope that maybe he could dodge this particular bullet.
Back at the house, when I helped him out of the Jeep, I noticed his rear end was covered in blood. I rushed him straight back to the vet’s. One of Brenin’s anal glands had become infected, a circumstance neither I nor Jean-Michel noticed until blood started pouring out of it. So now Brenin had to suffer the further indignity of having his rump shaved. Then Jean-Michel cut open the anal gland to allow the infection to drain out. Brenin was put on a cocktail of antibiotics and I took him home again. It was there that the real horror began.
It is of vital importance, Jean-Michel informed me, that the area is kept clean. And this meant that I had to wash Brenin’s bum every two hours with warm water and something that, according to my translation, he referred to as ‘feminine soap’. Apparently it’s a French thing – but you can get it at any chemist. So, that was another thing on my list of things I was really looking forward to doing: going to the village pharmacy and asking, perhaps with some supplementary miming should my vocabulary or grammar fail me, the rather attractive woman behind the counter whether she had any feminine soap. After I’d thoroughly scrubbed poor old Brenin’s backside, I had to syringe the anal gland. That is, I had to take a syringe, fill it with an antibacterial solution, stick it in Brenin’s now open and suppurating anal gland and inject him. And I had to do this every two hours, day and night. The key to his recovery, I was told, was making sure that the infection in the anal gland didn’t cross over and infect his surgery wound.
Jean-Michel told me to bring him in the following day. This I did, after a night of absolutely no sleep. By the time I reached the office, Brenin’s other anal gland had gone too and there was blood pouring out everywhere. ‘Mon Dieu,’ said Jean-Michel, and repeated the procedure of yesterday – he shaved the rest of Brenin’s bottom and cut open the other gland. I returned home for a long weekend of double-duty washing and syringing: every two hours, day and night. Nor was I to get much sleep between syringings either. Brenin had a big plastic surgical collar on, to prevent him from licking first one wound and then the other. Obviously, he detested this, and his preferred method of registering this was by slamming the collar against walls, tables, televisions and anything else he encountered.
Brenin was not, of course, happy about the treatment he was receiving. From his point of view, he went into the vet’s on Wednesday, feeling merely mildly unwell, and now he was having atrocity after atrocity inflicted on him every two hours. And, although he was not as strong as usual, he was still pretty strong and wasn’t going to allow me to interfere with his rear end if he could possibly help it. So I had to advance on him, corner him and drag him by the collar over to where I had left the bowl of soapy water, sponge and syringe. Then I had to force him to the ground, lie across him while he struggled and, when he got too weak to struggle, begin the washing and syringing. While I did this, Brenin would just lie there and whimper. Listening to that whimpering was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
When I took Brenin back into the vet’s on what I came to call Black Monday – which followed Black Friday, when his first anal gland went, and Black Saturday, when his second one turned also – his surgery wound had become cross-infected with the infection from the anal glands. He was now a very, very sick wolf. The cocktail of antibiotics that Jean-Michel had prescribed wasn’t working. On Friday, Jean-Michel had taken a swab and sent it away to a lab for testing, to find out which sort of bacterial infection it was and, more importantly, which antibiotics it was sensitive to. However, the results weren’t due back for a few days. In the meantime, we tried another antibiotic – efloroxacine – which had proved successful against highly resistant strains in the past. Also, Jean-Michel had to reopen Brenin’s surgery wound to scoop out the infection. The cleaning and syringing of his bottom continued apace, every two hours, for the next couple of days. But I now also had to do the same for his stomach, though, of course, with a different syringe.
When I brought him in again on Wednesday, the news was bad but not entirely unexpected. Brenin had a highly antibiotic-resistant form of E. coli similar in many ways to MRSA. The bacteria had, presumably, been in his gut prior to the surgery and his weakened immune system had allowed it to run riot. The upshot was that he was almost certainly going to die.
In a last throw of the dice, Jean-Michel decided to try something old school, something that really wasn’t done any more in the age of antibiotics. You’ve heard of people having knee reconstructions and shoulder reconstructions. Well, poor old Brenin had what was, in effect, an arse reconstruction.Noticing that his bum was reeking of bacteria, despite being spotless, and noticing the swelling in the area below the anal glands, Jean-Michel decided that Brenin’s problem now was that evolution had been less than maximally efficient in the doling out of anal glands. They might be very good for storing up scent for marking territory, but they were far less effective at draining unwanted bacterial infections. So Jean-Michel once more put Brenin under the knife and, if my translational abilities did not lead me astray, moved his anal glands an inch or so south (and you can imagine the amount of miming, by both parties, and the number of sketches that had to be drawn, to successfully communicate this idea to me). I was not too clear on the details or the mechanics, but the idea, Jean-Michel told me, was that the infection would now naturally drain out rather than being bottled up. But he – and I – didn’t hold out much hope.
I picked Brenin up again that evening and took him home to die. It is difficult to convey the sense of isolation, loneliness and desperation of those days. The real horror lay not in the realization that I was going to lose Brenin. All lives come to an end and – but for the six months he had spent incarcerated – I was happy with the life he had led. I believe he was too. The horror of the situation lay in doing what I had to do in order to try and keep him alive. Of course, his wounds were disgusting: they reeked of decay, and the stench of this permeated the entire house. But the horror had nothing to do with this. The horror lay in the suffering I had to impose on Brenin: suffering I had to inflict on him every two hours; suffering that would almost certainly be futile. At the core of this suffering, I think, was a certain kind of loneliness. This was not my loneliness – that was irrelevant. It was the loneliness of my boy.
Brenin was terrified – and all my efforts at comforting him could not change this. It is likely also that he was in significant pain – although I was not certain of this. But I am certain that my cleaning of his wounds, which I was still doing every two hours, day and night, hurt him considerably. My efforts to clean and heal him were inevitably accompanied by anything ranging from faint whimpering to high-decibel screeching. I believed that I was losing Brenin’s love. That was a horrible thought, but it did not get us to the heart of the present situation. If Brenin could only get better, I would be quite content with him hating me for the rest of his life. That is one of the many bargains that I, in my sleep-deprived psychosis, struck with God. The shit had indeed hit the fan, but my wolf cub was now old and dying in front of me. The real horror was the idea that Brenin would think he had lost my love. I kept thinking that he would remember the last few days of his life as ones where he was tortured by the man who was supposed to love him. I had betrayed him, abandoned him. And I was not the only one. Nina and Tess were frightened by Brenin’s big plastic collar. Whenever he went over to where they were lying, they would get up and go to the other side of the room. This broke my heart, and I think a little piece of it will always remain broken. People often say – usually when they’re trying to be dramatic – that we all die alone. Whether this is true, I don’t know. But, while it is easy to anthropomorphize these sorts of situations, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Brenin must have felt utterly alone, betrayed, abandoned and even brutalized by the pack that had been his life.
I am a consequentialist about matters moral. I believe that the rightness or wrongness of an action is solely a matter of its consequences. I am one of those people who believe that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’ve always had a deep distrust of intentions. I think that intentions are often masks, and masks within masks: pretences that we use to disguise the ugly truth of our real motivation. I told myself I would do for Brenin whatever I would want someone to do for me in similar circumstances. I wouldn’t keep him alive just for the sake of it, because I wouldn’t want to be kept alive just for the sake of it. But, if there was hope that I could recover and lead a full and fulfilling life, then I would want someone to fight for me – even if I didn’t understand what they were doing. And so, I told myself, I should fight for Brenin – even if he didn’t understand what I was doing, and even if he didn’t want me to do it. That is what I told myself, over and over again. But perhaps in reality, I simply wasn’t ready – wasn’t yet strong enough – to face a life without Brenin. Perhaps my seemingly noble principle – do unto Brenin as you would want others to do unto you – was just a mask to hide my unreadiness. Who knows what my real motivation was? Who knows if there is even any such thing as a real motivation? And, quite frankly, who cares?
In forcing Brenin to suffer like this, and in all likelihood to die like this, I was wagering my consequentialist soul. I was making the single most constant and important figure in my life over the past decade die a death that was full of pain and fear; a death where he felt abandoned by those he loved. If Brenin died, my actions would have been unpardonable. There would be no forgiveness for me for what I had done – and nor should there be. On the other hand, what if I had simply given up? What if I had given up when Brenin could have recovered? We cling so hard to our intentions, I think, because consequences are so unforgiving. Consequences damn us if we do; and frequently they also damn us if we don’t. For us consequentialists, it is often only luck – dumb luck – that can save us.
Brenin got better: incredible, but true. After a month or so – the precise timeline is something on which I was never too clear – I woke up from a few snatched minutes of sleep and there was something different about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something had changed. I now realize that it was this: Brenin was looking at me. I now understand that in the last month he had been averting his eyes from me – perhaps because he thought that if he caught my gaze I would remember that I should be in the process of inflicting pain on him. But I didn’t know this at the time. My first thought was this was it. I had seen both dogs and people die before, and I knew that often the immediate hours before they die are marked by an apparent recovery – just for a few hours they seem to be getting stronger, but this is only a sign that they are about to slip away. But Brenin didn’t slip away. In the next few days, his recovery continued, spreading throughout his body like a whispered rumour through a crowd, a rumour that slowly but surely transformed before my eyes into a promise. His appetite grew and his strength slowly returned. In a week’s time, we were ready for our first walk in well over a month – a gentle stroll into the reserve to look at the flamingos. The washing and syringing of the wounds, of course, continued, and would for several weeks. But the infection was broken. And Brenin no longer objected to my ministrations; he now just lay there patiently until I did what had to be done.
When I look back on those days, it is with a pronounced sense of unreality. For more than a month, the exigencies of Brenin’s treatment permitted me almost no sleep. Exhaustion would sometimes make me drop off, but I think this was only ever for a few minutes. Sometimes, when I woke, I would have forgotten that Brenin was ill. But then I would notice the stench of decay in my nostrils, and the situation, in its horror and hopelessness, would reassert itself over my consciousness. After even a few days of this, the delusions – the delusions of sleep deprivation – kick in. There were several, but the most common one was that I was dead and in hell, and this was it for all eternity.
Tertullian, the most vicious and depraved of the early Christians – and that is saying something – had a preferred vision of hell as a place where all those who were not saved were tortured by demons who would stick red-hot pitchforks in their bottoms, and things like that. The saved, on the other hand, would be in heaven’s box seats, laughing down gleefully at the torments of the damned. It is difficult to feel anything but contempt for Tertullian and the depths of the resentment he must have harboured for him to think of heaven and hell in these terms. Heaven was a spiteful place for Tertullian, and this was nothing more than a reflection of his spiteful soul. But as for hell, I think Tertullian’s vision is pretty mild.
Hell would be far worse if it were not a place where you are tortured and brutalized but, rather, a place where you are forced to torture and brutalize those you love most. You are forced to do this even though you find it sickening and this revulsion permeates through you to the depths of your soul. You are forced to do it even though it will cost you the thing you value most in the world: their love. But you do it anyway because – and here we find the genius of hell – it is for their own good. Hell gives you the choice and you do it anyway because the alternative is worse. This is far worse than Tertullian’s hell. If I were in this hell, I would exchange places with Tertullian’s damned in a heartbeat. In those days when Brenin was dying, I used to think this was what hell was – being forced to torture a wolf I loved because it was for his own good. But this would be a strange hell, in the same way that Tertullian’s vision was of a strange heaven. Tertullian’s heaven was populated with people who hate. My hell would be populated with people who love. I would like to think that those who hate can never go to heaven, and those who love can never go to hell. But the consequentialist in me won’t let me believe this.
People say all the time that they love their dogs. And I’m sure they think they do. But, believe me, until you’ve cleaned your dog’s smelly, suppurating, disease-ridden arse every two hours for well over a month, you really don’t know. We usually think of love as a sort of warm, fuzzy feeling. But love has many faces and this was just one of them.
When Brenin was so ill, I was the subject of a mélange, a haphazard assortment, of feelings, emotions and desires, none constant or prominent enough to be called the feeling of love. Much of the time, I felt as if I had been smashed in the face – breathless, shaky, dizzy, nauseous. Much of the time, I felt as if I was walking in, or rather through, quicksand; as if the air had partially congealed around me into a thick viscous stew that made any spontaneous action, or even thought, impossible. Mostly, I just felt numb. At one point, when I was certain he was going to die – and I don’t like to admit this, but it is true – I felt almost relieved, and thought that if, when I next went over to wash and syringe him, he didn’t wake up, then maybe that was for the best.
Feelings, feelings, feelings: all of them powerful, some almost overwhelming. But none of them that could be plausibly identified with the love I had for Brenin. The love in question is what Aristotle would have called philia. This is the love of the family, the love of the pack. It is distinguished from eros – the passionate longing of erotic love – and agape – the impersonal love of God and humanity as a whole. My attachment to Brenin was, I assure you, in no way erotic. And nor did I love Brenin in the way that the Bible tells me I should love my neighbour or love my God. I loved Brenin as a brother. And this love – this philia – is not a feeling of any sort.
Feelings can be manifestations of philia, and they can accompany it; but they are not what philia is. Why did I feel numb and nauseous? How could I actually feel relieved by the prospect of Brenin’s imminent death? Because I loved Brenin, and making him suffer so much was almost – but thank God not quite – unbearable. These feelings – diverse, disparate and disunited though they may be – are all manifestations of this love. But love is not any of these feelings. There are so many feelings that can, in different contexts, accompany it that philia cannot be identified with any of them. And it can exist without any of them.
Love has many faces. And if you love, you have to be strong enough to look upon all of them. The essence of philia is, I think, far harsher, far crueller, than we care to admit. There is one thing without which philia cannot exist; and this is not a matter of feeling but of the will. Philia – the love appropriate to your pack – is the will to do something for those who are of your pack, even though you desperately don’t want to do it, even though it horrifies and sickens you, and even though you may ultimately have to pay a very high price for it, perhaps heavier than you can bear. You do this because that is what is best for them. You do this because you must. You may never have to do this. But you must always be ready to do it. Love is sometimes sickening. Love can damn you for all eternity. Love will take you to hell. But if you are lucky, if you are very lucky, it will bring you back again.