The Way of the Dog Read Online Free

likely in most cases, that happy people are only pretending, I have often thought. It is probable, viewed scientifically, that their so-called happiness is at bottom an elaborate superstructure of evasion and denial, a Darwinian survival mechanism of some sort, a genetic falsehood designed to stave off the suicide of the species. This is undeniably the case in those who seem most happy, those who have by virtue of their social or business or artistic success a vested interest in appearing to be the happiest of all, when in fact they secretly are the most miserable people. In fact the professional happiness of these people deprives them even of the meager solace they might otherwise derive from a public exposition of their misery. Surely there are many cases where happiness is only possible on the basis of some sort of mental illness.
    Of course one is not talking now about the mass of ordinary, well-adjusted, supposedly happy individuals. One is talking about the crème de la crème of that mass, which would include people like Peter Meininger.
    The news lady used to throw me a paper too, occasionally into the bushes next to the steps, from where I would have to poke it with a stick or leave it to come slowly apart in the rain. They raised the price last year, nearly doubled it, and I let the subscription lapse. I was not reading the paper anyway. Roy would shit on spread-out sheets after I stopped taking him out regularly, before he discovered the basement. A year has passed and bits of paper still cling here and there to the bushes by the steps.
    I have always had a gift for sniffing out misery, antennae that can pick up the faintest reverberations of suffering, the flicker of a shadow across a face, the scarcely perceptible catch in a voice, the infinitesimal tug at the corner of a mouth. This ability, though it is hardly sympathy for the sufferers (I don’t give a damn about them personally), creates a sort of bond. The fact is, they interest me. The woman across the street, for example, who seems ill, and who for all I care can drop dead tomorrow, fascinates me. Standing safely on the shore—I have no intention of diving in—I amuse myself by watching her drown.
    The elation and immense relief that a released prisoner must feel when he steps from the prison door, while different in degree, are in kind like my feelings upon being released from boredom.
    What is the point of minor artists? What justification, what possible excuse? The litter, the mountains of waste product churned out by so-called artists, self -called artists, who aren’t artists at all but defilers of the idea of art. Instead of artists they should call themselves besmirchers.
    By minor I don’t mean unknown. The most famous painters today, for example, are also the most minor, just as the most famous writers are also the most insignificant writers. They are actually minuscule artists. It has always been like this, the insignificant and in fact inflated and empty rising naturally and even inevitably to the top and the weighty and significant sinking inevitably to the bottom, at least at the beginning, and there is nothing to be done about that.
    I don’t include so-called commercial artists, who are in the entertainment business and not artists at all.
    When I talk of minor artists, I include myself of course.
    Two slim books, two juvenile pamphlets written thirty years ago, that I can’t open now without blushing: an essay on Balthus, a tedious, pretentious, art-critical “assessment” of Balthus—as if I could measure Balthus—and a collection of ostentatiously off-the-cuff “art reflections” absolutely stuffed with juvenile poetic prose.
    I belittle them now in order to show myself superior to them, but at one time I was full of grandiose illusions.
    Instead of a body of work I have an index-card habit.
    I was able to live as a minor artist because of my independent fortune, my small independent fortune that let me be a minor artist for