But he persevered.

I made many attempts to get closer to him. They never succeeded. He was a constitutionally cheerful, athletic person. He seemed to me to be tough inside and out, in a way that was not without humor–to be a “man without nerves.” He appeared to be fairly free of excessive humane sentiments or compassion. Rightly interpreted, his coup de grâce had been administered not out of compassion for the animal’s suffering, but because, once it had broken loose and come into contact with the students, infectious matter must in all likelihood have entered the artificial opening in its cranium; he, Walter, had therefore been forced to regard the dog as doomed and in any event useless for the purposes of the experiment.

I avoided the beautiful student, who was often around us later and who in all innocence exhibited a provocative nature. I paid no further attention to her. My wife was physically and mentally her exact opposite, if there are different types among females.

I saw Walter often. The very look of him was a source of joy. I found his captivating, boyish laugh contagious. I liked to laugh, I even imitated other people’s laughs. But he always avoided personal conversation. I apparently did not interest him–and in this he was unlike many women, upon whom I made an impression without wishing to, who became a burden on me in one way or another, and who usually took me much more seriously than I did them.

IV

One might have thought that an experience such as this, the poodle fleeing in the middle of a scientific experiment, would have made me give up medical school in general and animal experiments in particular. What could have been more natural? I had an innate sense of the aesthetically interesting. As an art historian or the like, I would always have been able to hold my own. But I was driven to experiments (perhaps as a consequence of childhood experiences that I have yet to recount). I wanted to pit myself against a Walter, against this classical type of the excessively practical man who, for example, could see the animal in question as simply a piece of material, the way a carpenter does a piece of dense, nicely dry, knot-free wood.

But so long as it was animals that were the subjects of my experiments, all was well. The civilized world gladly shuts its eyes to this practice, as it does to war and so on. It was not until a human being met her maker that society got up in arms and had nasty things to say about my character. The fact is that if one day I decided to send my wife to her grave, and made this decision as coolly as I might have selected a laboratory animal for an experiment, that does not mean I undertook these two actions with total composure, with a completely clear conscience. There was thus consistency in that I never made these decisions without scruples.

But this scrupulousness was not a religious fear of sin. I did not believe in God. I was unable to countenance a world that included supernatural explanation. I would have liked to. It was not possible.

We are too young for godless anarchism. Thousands of generations before us have lived under the shadow of faith and, if they really had to suffer, at least suffered believing in a higher order and suffered for its sake. Perhaps a future generation will be equal to a life without faith. Will be able to look life in the eye, to see it for what it is. Will not lurch one way, then another, in benighted uncertainty. But I was not so fortunate. I was benighted from childhood on.