A Natural History of Love (55 page)

A recent Gallup Poll found that 58 percent of American households have pets. Forty percent of the people have dogs; 26 percent have cats. But 90 percent of the people said that they regarded their pet as a “part of the family,” bringing a sense of fullness and completion to their lives. Owning a pet is an important factor in the health and longevity of elderly people. Merely stroking a domestic animal lowers one’s blood pressure. So does watching it sit. Seeing nature being calm calms us. Most pet fondling takes place almost unconsciously, the way one’s hands absentmindedly stroke each other, or the way spouses press together as they sleep. Soothing, quieting, having a pet lie beside one tranquilizes the nerves. “Companion animals,” as they’re rather sweetly called, also provide an unflagging friendship and give owners a sense of playfulness and purpose. The minute a pet enters a household, it joins the family dynamics, and that can be either good or bad, depending on the people involved. For example, pets sometimes become the outpatients of a troubled family. When I was growing up, I had a friend, Barbara, whose parents bought a cocker spaniel. They named it Babe, and it became the “good little girl” in their household, as they so often told it, sometimes saying such things as: “Here comes your mother, Babe,” or, “Babe, go to your sister.” Barbara’s parents quarreled a lot, and they often spoke to each other through the dog. Her father might say something like: “Babe, tell your mother I’m not going to the store, and that’s final!” And her mother might answer: “Babe, tell him I’m going whether he likes it or not!” Babe became deeply attached to Barbara’s mother, whom she followed like an acolyte from room to room, next to whom she slept in bed every night, and whose absence made her too depressed even to eat. Once, when Barbara’s parents were on vacation in Europe, her mother called the dog-sitter to make sure Babe was eating all right. If she hadn’t been, the vacation would have been cut short. When it came to looking after Babe, nothing was too much trouble, not even baking her meatloaflike meals. Barbara, on the other hand, was entering puberty and she and her mother always seemed to be fighting about her friends, her taste in clothes, her music, her politics, and a hundred other things. Her father worked all day and came home tired and bad-tempered; except for yelling, he rarely spoke to her at all.

Barbara’s mother developed a powerful love for the dog, which loved her back devotedly, wet the floor in excited rapture whenever she returned home, never yelled at her or disagreed with her or confronted her with thorny child-rearing problems, didn’t make complex demands, and wasn’t expected to fulfill her potential. It was easy to shower affection on the dog, which she kissed and cuddled and groomed, and which indeed had become the good little girl in the family. Barbara, Babe’s “sister,” was relegated to the status of bad little girl. The pet enabled Barbara’s parents, who didn’t feel comfortable expressing love with each other or with their children, to bestow it on some living thing. This made Barbara feel resentful, as she watched her parents express love for the dog with a generosity they could not seem to muster for her. The dog joined the family, but Barbara felt excluded from it.

Pets become family members so easily because they remind us of children, which stimulates our instinct for nurturing them. As ethologist Konrad Lorenz surmised in his classic study of human behavior, what we call “cute” in animals are features they share with human infants: a large head in proportion to the body, with a high, bulging forehead; big eyes; round cheeks; short limbs and rather clumsy movements; behaviors like submissiveness and playfulness, which we associate with childhood. When we look at such beings, tenderness flows and we yearn to protect them. They seem instrinsically lovable. It doesn’t matter that we are programmed to find them so; we can’t help ourselves. This is not only true of animals; those characteristics appeal to us in adults, too. Unlike most other species, humans are neotenous, that is, they keep many of their juvenile features into adulthood. The people we call “pretty” retain more of those features than other people do. Dolls, cartoon characters, and stuffed animals are designed with these same features, but slightly exaggerated, to make them seem even cuter. Give a child a teddy bear with big amber eyes, small nose (unlike the pointy snout of a real bear), a gently bulging face, and stubby limbs, and the child instinctively adopts it, wants to cuddle and protect it. Why? you ask the child, who answers: “Because he’s so cute.” The stuffed animal touches an evolutionary tripwire inside the child, and a small explosion of nurturing ensues. Many of our favorite companion dogs have been bred to emphasize these appealing features. Just as birds have been known to feed anything that looks like a hungry fledgling (including an open-mouthed carp at the surface of a pond), humans will nurture many things, some animate, some inanimate.

We are driven to anthropomorphize animals, and often do, in cartoons, myths, and theme parks. Anthropologist Colin Turnbull discovered to his surprise and dismay that many people feel disappointed when they visit Africa, where the wilderness sprawls and the wild animals keep a distance, because it’s not as intimate an experience of “nature” as people seem to have at Disneyland, among cute animals that talk and come right up and embrace visitors. Juvenile behavior—the wobbly walk of penguins, a newborn calf struggling to its feet, shyness, the submissiveness young animals show their parents, or any version of play—has the same effect, inspiring us to parent and protect. People love their pets as children, that is, as specially exempt children. They will never grow to human size, or join in a game of canasta, or pass their college boards, or play saxophone, or refrain from rude noises when company’s around. They are not expected to develop, achieve greatness, or fulfill a private fantasy to be a doctor, baseball player, or rock star. They do not disappoint us, scandalize us, or cheat our expectations. We allow them the freedom to be exactly what they are, without worrying about what they must become. We let them live on their own schedule, at their own pace, as we rarely do with real children. And, because we expect nothing more, we love them, for pets perpetually please us.

POSTSCRIPT: THE MUSEUM

The first time I entered New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, I knew nothing of its layout or holdings. Pure serendipity led me to the lower level on Central Park West. There I drifted into a small, quiet gallery, and stood in front of a display of miscroscopic invertebrates, creatures that inhabit the minute wetlands of our lives. Whisker-perfect glass models of rotifers and protozoans shone from their display case. These models, vastly enlarged for the exhibit, are actually single-celled organisms that live in lakes, ponds, puddles, on damp soil, in mosses, between sand grains on beaches, and even in small depressions in rocks. Protozoans also live in or on most animals as parasites or symbionts. Some are colonial; some are phosphorescent; one was shaped like the lunar landing module, another like the gem-encrusted tiara of Queen Elizabeth, yet another like a Christmas-tree ornament. Others resembled snow-flakes, Amazon fig trees with their root systems exposed, jellyfish trailing gothic church spires.

Relishing their intricacy and variety, I felt so startled by joy that my eyes teared. It was a religious experience of power and clarity, limning the wonder and sacredness of life, life at any level, even the most remote. I have often been touched by the cathedral-like architecture of the microscopic, which I love to study in photographs taken through scanning electron microscopes. One year, I spent off-duty hours hooking rya rugs after the patterns of amino-acid leucine (seen by polarized light), an infant’s brain cells, a single neuron, and other objects revealed by such photographic delving.

If I could have formulated the emotion I felt in words at the invertebrate exhibit, it would have been something like this: even the world around us, though invisible to the naked eye, is packed with marvels. Creatures unimaginably complex, breathtakingly frail and yet sturdy, durable, filled with the self-perpetuating energy we call life. Creatures that are omnipresent, wherever water rests. As tiny and frail as these life forms are, they survive hurricanes, earthquakes, the casual chaos of human feet. I felt what Walt Whitman may have when he wrote of the starry night, “the bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place.” His intuition bespeaks both the faith in the unknown and the extrapolation of belief that love and religion require. The part stands for the whole, the single instance for the general truth, as it does in natural history museums, which say, in effect,
Here is a wildebeest on the African savanna, but there are many more of them, it’s part of a species. This is what they need. This is what they fear. This is how they behave. Trust in it
. I wasn’t thinking those things then, or worrying about what protozoan can do to one’s digestive system, just feeling saturated by wonder. Only praise leapt to mind, praise that knows no half-truth and pardons all.

What is a natural history museum? It’s a silent oasis in the noisy confusion of the world, isolating phenomena so that they can be seen undistractedly. What is being collected are not the artifacts themselves but the undivided attention of the visitors.
That
is the museum. It lies in the mind of the viewers. Its real holdings are the perpetuation of wonder amid a maelstrom of social and personal distractions. “Collection” is a good word for what happens—not to them, but to you. One becomes collected for a spell, gathering up one’s curiosity the way rainwater collects on the ziggurat roofs of Caribbean homes. Every museum is really a museum of one’s high regard. That’s why we visit them so often, even though we know the holdings by heart. It functions as a sort of pilgrimage and vigil. We go there to express our love, our humility, our worship. Museums are where we store some of our favorite attitudes about life.

The ceilings in the American Museum of Natural History look drafty and high, the galleries lead through many mazes and levels. For instance, to get from the invertebrates to the Hall of Minerals and Gems you must first pass through the North American Forests, the Mollusks, and the Meteorites—with perhaps a side trip to the carvings of the Northwest Coast Indians, or to see the ninety-four-foot-long blue whale in the Hall of Ocean Life. I’ve always felt this meandering layout appropriate, since curiosity needs to rise and fall through many elevations and troughs. It’s like prowling around a huge attic, in which the trunks and scrapbooks have been opened. No sooner are you fascinated by the ancestors of the horse than you become equally enchanted by totem poles. In the Hall of Minerals and Gems, I usually pause at the colossal slabs of jade and amethyst; the apricot topaz the size of an ox head; the cluster of black azurite crystals (some of them five inches long) which is considered to be the finest mineral specimen in existence; the Fabergé menagerie of exquisitely carved gems, including an agate pig with ruby eyes and carnelian teats. I marvel at all the shapes and color of sparkle that people have given each other as tokens of love. Then I make a beeline for the opals, whose buxom kaleidoscopes captivate me. They are only a form of wet sand, I remind myself, with light skidding among the particles of silica and the spaces between them. And yet they flash lightning bolts of color. I know how they do it, but am still perpetually bowled over by them. Next to the opals are open clamshells glazed with nacre. In each one, pearls have formed by coating stray grit with a smooth, gemlike luster. How odd that women wear them to look elegant and proper, that divers risk bursting their lungs to gather them like rigid posies from the ocean depths. Like clams, whales produce ambergris to coat jagged annoyances that they have ingested (squid beaks and such). Both pearls and ambergris result in great beauty, and I love looking at them because they offer a Zen-like lesson about how to deal with irritations.

In the new Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, one diorama in particular haunts me, and I know I will often be returning to it: a full-size, startlingly lifelike “Lucy” and her mate as she must have looked walking upright across Ethiopia three million years ago. Based on scientific fact and educated guesswork, these models are deeply evocative. Our earliest prehuman relatives
(Australopithecus afarensis)
, they had lower IQs than we have, but were very human in stance, movements, and basic emotions. Standing about three-and-a half-feet tall, weighing sixty pounds or so, Lucy apparently suffered from arthritis and died in her twenties. Her slender fingers and toes curved more than ours, and she had more body hair than modern women do, but she traveled by foot through the forests and plains. Her friends and relatives would be with her, and a special male friend with whom she dines and loves; she holds their child in her arms. She needs the male for food, protection, and something unsayable—perhaps the feeling of peace and wholeness she knows when they lie together in the tall grass. She would be jealous of other females, possessive about her male, and yet find other males appealing. Occasionally, she might be tempted to sneak off with one for a dangerous liaison. In a few years, she and her male might break up and start second families. But that emotional cataclysm would be the farthest thing from her mind as she travels with her lover.