Life

Detail from the poster for the film adaptation of Le Marquis de Sade’s La Philosophie Dans le Boudoir, Beyond Love and Evil (1969, by Jacques Scandelari)

First thing on a cold recent morning, I came upon a stink bug on the kitchen floor, which is an unusual place to find a stink bug around here. They are usually found on walls and windows or within jackets, coats and other clothing. My eyesight has never been great, so I did not at first think it was a stink bug at all but rather a fumbled and forgotten berry or cat food kibble or some such. I bent down and picked it up a little more roughly than I would if I had known it was a stink bug but, as soon as I was aware of it, I loosened my grip, walked out of the kitchen and let it crawl off my hand and onto a shelf in another room. I did not have the will to toss it out the kitchen door to freeze to death in the February morning air outside.

I am getting soft in my old age. I don’t want to kill anything, anymore. I understand that is not how life works. I understand that nature is a constant battle right down to the cellular level that keeps each of us alive. I get that it is common wisdom for all of this to be approached as a dog-eat-dog world.

I recalled when I was a child and first heard the phrase “dog-eat-dog world.” The way I had heard it was “doggy dog world.” Since, I was very young and that was the way I heard it, it made no sense to me in the tone of sad resignation that it is routinely used. A doggy dog world sounded kind of fun. And of course, while the actual expression eventually came to make a…