The Philosopher and the Wolves

For this week's MindLetter, I found myself thinking about the creatures we share our lives with, and the nature of commitment...

Mark Rowlands was a philosophy lecturer in Alabama when he first acquired a wolf. A six-week-old baby wolf, to be precise, one that only answered to what was a legal amount of wolf in Alabama at the time (96%; the rest had to be dog). Brenin was a grey bundle of fluff whose capacity for destruction was disarmingly monstrous. Cables, shoes, and other such recognisable categories of potential alarm to dog owners were nothing. The wolf demolished pretty much everything in his surroundings whenever left alone; curtains, crates – once, an air conditioner. Thus, Rowlands does what any lecturer in his position might have done twenty years ago, but which you’d never get away with now: he takes his wolf to work.

As Rowlands would go on to write many years later, in his 2008 book The Philosopher and the Wolf – our last book for PhD Book Club – the arrival of a wolf changed his life. There was the immediate disruption: wherever Rowlands went, now Brenin must go too, whether rugby training or a seminar on Kant’s categorical imperative. But there was also something more opaque, difficult to quantify: how the meeting of these two determined creatures created a committed intermingling of human and lupine lives. One might think that the nature of that commitment was not symmetrical – indeed that ownership of an animal, even a wolf, precludes the possibility of symmetry. Yet Rowlands begged to differ. He did not own Brenin, he says; the wolf was neither property nor pet. If anything, ‘he was my brother’ – younger at times, to be protected and guided, for sure; but at others, older, ‘a brother that I admired and wanted, above all, to emulate’.

When I read these words I hear them on two planes of time: one now, with my own black and white wolf (way less than 96%, honest) snoozing placidly in the hallway; and one many years ago, when as a little girl I regularly described our forty kilogram German Shepherd as my brother. I knew even then that we were committedly intermingled, that he loved and protected us, as our job was to love and protect him. But what would it mean to emulate this brother, this silky-furred sister? What is it that we admire in our companion animals, either for the beauty of them, or because we want it for ourselves?

Rowlands suggests that it is their relationship to time. ‘We see through moments,’ he writes, ‘and for that reason the moment escapes us. A wolf sees the moment but cannot see through it. Time’s arrow escapes him.’ We are temporal creatures, forever living in past or future, relating to the moment before us – the shredded curtains, the scattered food wrappers – only insofar as it takes us onward or back. Where I might tire of a daily routine, Hope is every bit as thrilled this time as the last, and the couple of hundred before that. You can’t beat a cardboard snuffle box with Pringles-level pellets of hyper-palatable, ultra-processed dog food; or the park, or the beach, or the lamp-post; or the moment I walk in through the front door. How many times have I still felt guilty over a late dinner bowl or a missed physio session, while my little wolf is already renewed, delighted, replete in the moment?

This key difference between us and our wolves means that illness, loss, or death itself ‘have a dominion over us that they cannot have over a creature of the moment.’ Severe illness, for example, thwarts and stalls us because ‘it will cut off the arrows of our desires, and our goals and projects, and we know it.’ It is of our future that we fear the loss, the bad ending to the book of our lives, its chapters retrospectively reworked in the light of an unwelcome foreclosing. If not illness, or death, it might be the ending of a job, a relationship, a degree, a home, that puts us in this essential bind: ‘Because we are better at looking through moments than looking at them,’ Rowlands writes, ‘we both want our lives to have meaning and are unable to understand how our lives could have meaning. Temporality’s gift to us is the desire for what we cannot understand.’

And yet…and yet. We know – and I think Rowlands does too – that this is not true. There is a wolf in all humans. We have the capacity both to drop startlingly into a moment of beauty, and to tolerate the unimaginable if we literally take it moment by moment. Temporality will have its way with us, and we need to grieve our losses, just as we get to celebrate gifts of good fortune. But there is wolfishness in us all. Wolfishness is when you are a three-month-old wolf cub, and you are pinned to the ground by a 90 pound pitbull, and from your throat comes the merest, squeakiest growl; it is when you salve the wounds of your dying wolf in his last weeks and days, every two hours around the clock, and he hates it, and you are hallucinating with exhaustion, but you keep doing it anyway (…and he will live for another year); it is when you cannot go on, and yet you do, one breath at a time.

So we are creatures of the moment, too. It is there, the lupine part, underneath the planning and figuring out, the hopes and fears, the strategies and stories of humankind. We learn it best from those with whom we are committedly intermingled: the border collies, the wolves, the loved ones of all kinds. Sometimes – don’t we all play this imaginary spin of the dice, when it comes to our commitments – I wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t have Hope. I would have more time to write, and more money to go on holiday. I could be more spontaneous; my home would contain fewer ripped-up rabbits (cardboard snuffle boxes).

But that is not the life I am living. In this one, the loss of Hope would – one day, will – be a great sorrow. That is the thing about committed intermingling: it commits you to the world, and to your life, in all its pulsing present moments. Mark Rowlands needed the lifetime of a grey wolf to learn how to be human. What you will learn, and from whom, is for the future to unfold. But maybe it is already happening now; in this moment, in this breath.

It just better not be the curtains.

Warm wishes

Kitty