George Eliot:
“We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.”
On day two in New York I saw George Eliot was wrong. Corky wasn’t ignorant of my faults at all. Working through the tangled places she surmised my confusions. Stopping before a flight of subway steps she looked up at my face, wanting to be certain I’d found my location and that my footing was secure.
**
And the caresses of the subway dark! A softness like twilight under the city! The ante-room of Hell with its stink of burnt rubber and urine and the collected odor of ten million human fears—and we were forging ahead through the damasked air and I don’t know how to convey it—but the rhythms of the trains and our own courage were tightly bound. Who the hell is happy in the subway? I swear we were.
Planet of the Blind 