There are two of us in the room – my dog and me. Outside a terrible storm is raging.
The dog sits there in front of me, looking me straight in the eye.
And I look back into her eyes.
She seems as if she would like to tell me something. She’s dumb, she has no words, she can’t understand herself – but I can understand her.
What I understand is that, in this instant, the very same feeling exists in her and in me; there is no difference between us. We are identical: in both of us the same flickering flame burns and shines.
Death will come, flapping his wide, cold wing until… he blows the flame out!
Who then will make out the tiny flame that once burned in both of us?
No, this is not an animal and a human exchanging glances…
It is two pairs of the same eyes, each pair fixed on the other.
And in each of these pairs of eyes, in the animal and the human, one and the same life shrinks down fearfully towards the other.
Ivan Turgenev, Poems in Prose, February 1878