Gregisdead121 ’s Reviews > A Domestic Animal > Status Update

"It will be with me always—something to live with and something to die
with and something that is now so indissolubly a part of myself that I
cannot conceive of a future without it.
I can only pray again to the God in whom I have never believed: O God,
teach me to care and not to care."

"I started this book in the hope that the writing of it would be both
cathartic and therapeutic, but it has proved neither. The demon has not been
exorcised; I remain at once possessed and dispossessed."

Pam and I were unhappy; but ours was the unhappiness of those who
have acknowledged the deepest needs of their natures and have achieved
the perfect freedom that comes from service to those needs, however
fruitless that service. Antonio was unhappy because he only knew obscurely
what those deepest needs were, and because he was ashamed of them and
frightened of them.

Pam and I were unhappy; but ours was the unhappiness of those who
have acknowledged the deepest needs of their natures and have achieved
the perfect freedom that comes from service to those needs, however
fruitless that service. Antonio was unhappy because he only knew obscurely
what those deepest needs were, and because he was ashamed of them and
frightened of them.

Pam and I were unhappy; but ours was the unhappiness of those who
have acknowledged the deepest needs of their natures and have achieved
the perfect freedom that comes from service to those needs, however
fruitless that service. Antonio was unhappy because he only knew obscurely
what those deepest needs were, and because he was ashamed of them and
frightened of them.

‘Italians are not really domestic animals’;
but all three of us had been
determined to make of him a household pet. Pam and I had failed, as we
had always been doomed to fail; Chiaretta had succeeded, having caught
him young enough and trained him soon enough. He would always want to
escape and he would never escape.

His body has sweated on your body, as I am sweating on it now. His odours have lingered here as mine will linger. Deep inside of you some essence of him lurks and will, however vestigially, lurk forever, just as some essence of me
will also lurk there.
With each stab that brought from her a shuddering moan, whether of pain or
of pleasure, I seemed to be obliterating her, to reach through to him.

"I would imagine myself somehow concealed in that
bedroom of his—in the cupboard, behind the curtain—while he and Pam
writhed together on the bed. I imagined a threesome, Pam between us, a
hampering object through which we both thrust to reach what each of us
really craved—each other. I imagined drugging him or knocking him
unconscious or even killing him, in order to have my way."

"It is painful for me now to remember my coolly insulting answers; but I
must do so if this story is to serve the purpose I have designed for it. It is
easy to blame my conduct on certain chemical changes in the blood; but
they merely precipitated what was already there, as a hot compress draws
out the pus that lurks deep in an abscessed wound."