The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage Page A

abundant energy, a plenitude of life, arms swinging at my sides, a spring in my step, air rushing in and out of the lungs as I strode effortlessly. The feeling returns in dreams, as if the body were dreaming. Perhaps I am only truly happy when I am asleep, when the broken body has healed itself in dreams.
    In place of the old wooden cane I have two new metal ones. Their length is adjustable and they have rubber tips that prevent slipping. They are depressingly medical, but they weigh almost nothing. If anything they are too light, too responsive to the involuntary jerks and twitches that have plagued me lately, making them difficult to control. I lift a cane, intending to move it forward, and it shoots off to the right or left.
    She has brought home a recording of Mahler’s Adagietto. She plays it over and over. She wants to drive me crazy. She knows how I feel about Mahler, how my emotional life was dominated by him for a long time, how my emotions were structured by his music, how it was only listening to his music that I was able to feel anything that I would call genuine emotion, healthy emotions that were not contrived and sick, and so she is using that music to destroy me, playing it over and over until it is thoroughly trite.
    She knows there was a period of life when I was prostrate because of Mahler’s music.
    First it was television, now it is Mahler.
    By the time I was eighteen I was already practically insane. By the time I was twenty I was already completely crazy. I must have been partly crazy for a long time before that, perhaps from birth.
    I suppose it is still not possible to examine a newborn and determine if it is insane or bound to become insane, though I expect this will become possible in the not-too-distant future.
    A note on the kitchen table: “sandwich in fridge.”
    A young American woman was in a bookstore in Strasbourg, France. It was 1954 or 55. She was very young, scarcely out of high school, traveling alone, it was her first trip to Europe, where she knew no one. It had snowed in the night, the snow turning to sleet in the morning, and she had come into the bookstore to get warm. It was a very good bookstore, with books in several languages, though she did not know this before entering. Now, standing among the books in many languages, she was aware that she was in Europe, that Europe was everywhere around her, and that America, where she had been unhappy, was far away. She thought of herself as taking the first steps in what would become her new life, though she as yet had no clear notion of what this life would resemble. She was at the rear of the store, looking at books in German, though she could not read German, pulling them from the shelves and opening them, because of the magic of the names—Hölderlin, Rilke, Schopenhauer, Trakl. The shop was unusually crowded—people like her who had come in to escape the weather, many of them standing about talking and paying no attention to the books. Among them was a young man, slight of build, handsome in an acerbic way, sharp nosed and thin lipped, perhaps no older than the American girl, though the angular features made him appear older than he was. If the girl had looked in his direction and later written home about it she would have described him as a “European intellectual.” And she would have noticed that he did not take his eyes off her. He watched her as she slowly turned the pages of a thin volume she had pulled from a shelf in front of her. She held it almost level with her face and was silently mouthing the words. Though she could not understand the words, she felt, mouthing them in this way, that she was penetrating their deepest, most mysterious meaning. She had often imagined a future for herself in which she would speak several languages and write poetry that would appear in books as handsome as this one. Had she turned her head only slightly to the left she might have noticed the young man. She would have been struck by his