What do you think?
Rate this book
Ramses: A Memoir
Ramses was the best dog in the world, the cleverest, friendliest, most expressive, understanding, amusing dog that ever was, and it was only a happy coincidence that he happened to be ours.
99 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 18, 2022
3 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Theodore Dalrymple
100 books629 followersAnthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 26, 2022
A loving tribute written beautifully. (Cat lovers, beware.)
Read the paperback. (108 pages)
Notes:
16 melancholy … pleasurable and painful, like pressing on an inflamed part
18 Wanted him to have a mind of his own – not to be a yes-dog
Needed a margin of choice if he were to be a companion rather than a slave.
22 His interest was intense and all-consuming whatever he did. Obedient to the injunction in Ecclesiastes: Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might …
… for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, no wisdom, in the grave where thou goest. [cf the night cometh]
26 devastation of loss
27 a cat is a torturer of mice … if it had any finer feelings, it would leave the mice alone.
If it is the lack of affection that you want in an animal, why not go the whole hog, and take a reptile?
41 Parents never spoke to one another.
81 In my youth, when I thought myself clever …
J Witness … good, rather than clever
86/87 dog show … a means to glorify their owners
92 Gradgrind = materialistic Philistine outlook [Dickens]
99 Johnson Better sometimes to be deceived than never to trust.
Read the paperback. (108 pages)
Notes:
16 melancholy … pleasurable and painful, like pressing on an inflamed part
18 Wanted him to have a mind of his own – not to be a yes-dog
Needed a margin of choice if he were to be a companion rather than a slave.
22 His interest was intense and all-consuming whatever he did. Obedient to the injunction in Ecclesiastes: Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might …
… for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, no wisdom, in the grave where thou goest. [cf the night cometh]
26 devastation of loss
27 a cat is a torturer of mice … if it had any finer feelings, it would leave the mice alone.
If it is the lack of affection that you want in an animal, why not go the whole hog, and take a reptile?
41 Parents never spoke to one another.
81 In my youth, when I thought myself clever …
J Witness … good, rather than clever
86/87 dog show … a means to glorify their owners
92 Gradgrind = materialistic Philistine outlook [Dickens]
99 Johnson Better sometimes to be deceived than never to trust.
July 19, 2024
There are dog people and there are cat people. I will not say “and never the twain shall meet,” because I have come to like both cats and dogs, but there is a difference. I have an outdoor male cat, a half-feral tough guy with a clipped ear, whom I admire and consider a friend in the same way I admire and consider friends the crows that visit and beg for treats at my office window. But I shamelessly love my little schnauzer. I pamper her. I leap to attend her every need. I baby-talk to her. My heart breaks when she’s sick or hurt or frightened. I am a dog person.
So, it turns out, is Theodore Dalrymple, though I wouldn’t have known it until I read this short memoir about his Yorkshire Terrier named Ramses, who died in 2007. If I needed another reason to feel a sort of spiritual kinship with the man I fondly call “TheoDal,” now I have it. Not only is his adopted surname my actual surname, and his natural conservatism cousin to my own – and not only is he worth admiring as perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – but the man loves dogs.
Ramses, however, is not your typical dog lover’s memoir. This is not James Herriot material. It’s an oddity like J. R. Ackerly’s My Dog Tulip, but at the same time more sentimental and more philosophical. I picked it up for a diversion – an interlude – in the middle of reading William Shirer’s massive Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (I needed a break before diving into Operation Barbarossa). But I found myself marking passages in Ramses left and right. TheoDal is always quotable. Here are just a few of the passages that caught my eye:
There was no evening...in the course of which I did not reflect, as I saw Ramses so busy with his affairs, on the fact that I knew he was to die and that he did not, and that I would survive him by many years through no desert or merit of my own. It was a painful thought, but I could not rid myself of it... Did this superior apprehension of reality, or at least of one important feature of reality, constitute an advantage or a disadvantage, a blessing or a curse? Was it better to live unselfconsciously in the moment, or, by taking thought, be able to foresee the denouement of our lives which is death? To this there is no clear or unequivocal answer, except, perhaps, that it is now the one and now the other. Never to be able to live in the moment is never to experience anything as an end in itself, anything that requires no further justification; but always to live in the moment is (at least for humans, presumably dogs have no choice in the matter) to be imprudent, improvident and almost certainly parasitic on others.
It is true that the love of dogs in general is usually more genuine than the love of humanity in general, but every person with a dog loves his or her dog in particular, and is prepared to go to much greater lengths to save it than for anybody else’s dog.
Is the pampering of dogs, which I think is widespread, a manifestation of decadence, or of the breakdown of human relations that leads to the overinvestment in dogs of ever greater emotion, or is it, on the contrary, a sign of moral advance that one owes to one’s dog the most pleasure that it is possible to give him? …Is it wrong to concern oneself with the diet of a dog and expend money on it when there is so much poverty and hardship in the world? In relative terms, no doubt, there is much less poverty than there used to be, but in absolute terms there is quite enough to be getting on with. There is a school of moral philosophy that argues that we have a duty to use whatever wealth we have to produce the greatest reduction possible in human misery, and therefore that the expensive pampering of dogs is morally objectionable, indeed highly reprehensible. I think this is in fact a miserabilist philosophy, wrong in theory and disastrous in practice.
The human mind is, among other things, an instrument for avoiding unpleasant realities.
Finally, on the theme of that last one, and the magical thinking we indulge in to deny how short-lived dogs are compared to humans:
Had not the life expectancy of dogs, after all, increased pari passu with that of human beings? We preferred to believe in some kind of Zeno’s paradox with regard to life expectancy. The latter, though it shortens with age, at least after infancy, never falls to zero, and therefore, like the arrow, never arrives at its destination, which is death. Thus Ramses would never die and we should have him with us always.
But of course it doesn’t work that way, and writing fifteen years after the death of his dog, Dalrymple’s grief is still palpable. There’s as much tragedy as comedy in this book, perhaps more.
So, it turns out, is Theodore Dalrymple, though I wouldn’t have known it until I read this short memoir about his Yorkshire Terrier named Ramses, who died in 2007. If I needed another reason to feel a sort of spiritual kinship with the man I fondly call “TheoDal,” now I have it. Not only is his adopted surname my actual surname, and his natural conservatism cousin to my own – and not only is he worth admiring as perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – but the man loves dogs.
Ramses, however, is not your typical dog lover’s memoir. This is not James Herriot material. It’s an oddity like J. R. Ackerly’s My Dog Tulip, but at the same time more sentimental and more philosophical. I picked it up for a diversion – an interlude – in the middle of reading William Shirer’s massive Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (I needed a break before diving into Operation Barbarossa). But I found myself marking passages in Ramses left and right. TheoDal is always quotable. Here are just a few of the passages that caught my eye:
There was no evening...in the course of which I did not reflect, as I saw Ramses so busy with his affairs, on the fact that I knew he was to die and that he did not, and that I would survive him by many years through no desert or merit of my own. It was a painful thought, but I could not rid myself of it... Did this superior apprehension of reality, or at least of one important feature of reality, constitute an advantage or a disadvantage, a blessing or a curse? Was it better to live unselfconsciously in the moment, or, by taking thought, be able to foresee the denouement of our lives which is death? To this there is no clear or unequivocal answer, except, perhaps, that it is now the one and now the other. Never to be able to live in the moment is never to experience anything as an end in itself, anything that requires no further justification; but always to live in the moment is (at least for humans, presumably dogs have no choice in the matter) to be imprudent, improvident and almost certainly parasitic on others.
It is true that the love of dogs in general is usually more genuine than the love of humanity in general, but every person with a dog loves his or her dog in particular, and is prepared to go to much greater lengths to save it than for anybody else’s dog.
Is the pampering of dogs, which I think is widespread, a manifestation of decadence, or of the breakdown of human relations that leads to the overinvestment in dogs of ever greater emotion, or is it, on the contrary, a sign of moral advance that one owes to one’s dog the most pleasure that it is possible to give him? …Is it wrong to concern oneself with the diet of a dog and expend money on it when there is so much poverty and hardship in the world? In relative terms, no doubt, there is much less poverty than there used to be, but in absolute terms there is quite enough to be getting on with. There is a school of moral philosophy that argues that we have a duty to use whatever wealth we have to produce the greatest reduction possible in human misery, and therefore that the expensive pampering of dogs is morally objectionable, indeed highly reprehensible. I think this is in fact a miserabilist philosophy, wrong in theory and disastrous in practice.
The human mind is, among other things, an instrument for avoiding unpleasant realities.
Finally, on the theme of that last one, and the magical thinking we indulge in to deny how short-lived dogs are compared to humans:
Had not the life expectancy of dogs, after all, increased pari passu with that of human beings? We preferred to believe in some kind of Zeno’s paradox with regard to life expectancy. The latter, though it shortens with age, at least after infancy, never falls to zero, and therefore, like the arrow, never arrives at its destination, which is death. Thus Ramses would never die and we should have him with us always.
But of course it doesn’t work that way, and writing fifteen years after the death of his dog, Dalrymple’s grief is still palpable. There’s as much tragedy as comedy in this book, perhaps more.
May 9, 2022
An affectionate, loving, and wide-ranging remembrance of the sort we would all hope to be subject to.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews