I’ve always wondered what goes on in Oliver’s head when I look into his pit-hound eyes.

Maybe this is the answer. I heard Jonathan Schwartz read these lines on his Sunday show… they’re from Edith Wharton’s journal in 1924.

”I am secretly afraid of animals…. I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.”