but I could not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine.
Incidentally, he would have been out of place; for dogs have not
their due honour in the East; and this seemed to sharpen my sense
of my own domestic sentinel as a sort of symbol of the West.
On the other hand, the East is full of donkeys, often very
dignified donkeys; and when I turned my attention to the other
grotesque quadruped, with an even larger head and even longer ears,
he seemed to take on a deep shade of oriental mystery.
I know not why these two absurd creatures tangled themselves up
so much in my train of thought, like dragons in an illuminated text;
or ramped like gargoyles on either side of the gateway of my adventure.
But in truth they were in some sense symbols of the West and the East
after all. The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravagance
of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day,
at going out for a walk down the same road. The modern world
is full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally
accompanied with human sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little of
the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence
of all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin.
I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise;
and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But I cannot
claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends,
I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness;
or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this
power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things
that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation.
And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation.
His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret.
He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk,
but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of Scripture.