Free The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage

top of her steps, tells us they are refugees. Those are the words she uses: we are refugees. She removes her gloves and places her hands on the stair railing, leaning over, gripping the gloves between her palms and the railing. She tells us they have been driven out of the area around the university, where they would prefer living, they have been chased out by people with acres of money , she says, who have made it unaffordable for middle-class people (she means people like herself and her husband) to continue living there, even though they are both teachers at the university. The housing situation has forced them to become commuters , she complains from the top of the steps. Standing on the sidewalk, half listening to Moll and the woman talking about the housing situation, I find myself thinking about how the social and cultural condition of university professors has changed in recent decades. It occurs to me that workers in the so-called humanities, people like this woman and her husband, are now basically cultural machine operators , day laborers in the inhuman industrial-scale manufacture of useless commentary on mass-culture products. Though I never set foot there now, I was once a university habitué , I was over there every day working on my Balthus pamphlet, when I was practically an art scholar. They think in lockstep. They all have the same humanist morality, the same liberal politics, the same barely disguised class anxiety, the same laughable faith in the value of independent inquiry and thinking for oneself. Seen strictly from the point of view of a potential flowering of intellectual diversity, nothing was gained by liberating the serfs.
    I am thinking it would be best to shut the universities down and replace them with scientific-technical institutes, though I don’t say those things to her.
    The neighbors and I seldom speak. But when we do I am a portrait of courtesy.
    She asks where we live. Looking in the direction Moll indicates, she says, “We were wondering who lived in that house.”
    I happen to know a great many things, still. Not things that would help toward understanding, not “wise sayings,” just pointless tidbits, amusing anecdotes, intellectual garbage, and random scraps of information.
    For example, that Edward Lear’s mother bore twenty-one children.
    That in India the Jains sweep the path in front of them in order not to crush an insect or worm, and they will not walk in puddles for fear of stepping on creatures living in the water.
    That Artaud died in the psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine. He was seated at the foot of his bed. He was holding his left shoe.
    Everyone remembers the shoe. It is just the emblem they are seeking. An emblem of absolute desolation and loss. A crazy old man, eaten by cancer, the wreckage of genius—everything is there, the mingling of banality and horror, in the image of the shoe.
    The meaningless specificity of the description—that it was his left shoe.
    She notices the mug slipping from my grip. She quickly, deftly, takes it back and sets it on the table in front of me. I hold it in both hands. Some of the coffee spills.
    I would sometimes carry binoculars on my walks with Roy, to look for migrating birds on the river. I liked watching people also, catching them unawares and unselfconscious. I might look over at a man seated beneath a tree, unwrapping a sandwich or reading or just staring out at the river, and be fascinated. I might see this man who is looking out across the water as filled with longing, sunk in despair, lost in reverie, and it was like looking at a painting. I would find myself weaving a little story around him, depending on my mood. I would never, I want to say, just leave him out there alone. I am aware that most people, blinded by their own good fortune and robust psychological health, stupefied by the moral obtuseness that accompanies good health and is perhaps its precondition and by the failure of imagination that is its