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| loyalty of dogs are, like so many other things, white lies, at best. Or the delicate kindnesses, the thoughtful-ness, of lovers early in their romance, before the the first disappointment and disillusion and anger and storms and pride begin. Or the deep generosity of animal lovers, who find in animals an easier goal for their loving than people: the animal is no more than it appears, and as it appears, so it is, whereas who knows what a person is, or what a person will do or how what a person appears to be is connected to what in fact he is, she is. We don't know, and our lives are sometimes a painful education in that ignorance that encompasses, and includes, us. Until we learn to love without understanding, almost without beauty, because without either inner or outer light, in the hope  | that that light, and thus beauty, will one day appear. A painful exercise one can hardly be expected to carry out for long. And so we fall back on something less ambig-uous, such as animals or plants - simple, trans-parent, responsive to the touch, flourishing beneath our hands - alive without menace. Or fall back even further, on books, music, movies, art, etc. - the traces, sometimes of an overwhelm-ing loveliness, of those ambiguous, ambivalent, confusing, contradictory, threatening beings, one of which each of us is. The beauty, the beast, in the mirror. "What about pride?" - "What about it? - The preferred term these days seems to be ego, or  | |||
