1. The Dog

Weltschmerz.

A German word for the pain of the world: the sorrow born from the distance between the world as it is and the world as we somehow feel it could be.

I learned the word only recently.

Yet it felt strangely familiar, as though somebody had finally given a name to something I had been carrying long before I knew it needed one.

Perhaps the word came late because the feeling had arrived first.

One night in Beirut, I was driving with one of my closest friends through the city after midnight. The streets were nearly empty, and Beirut rested in the exhausted silence of a place that had survived too much and still refused to stop becoming.

As we passed through Martyrs’ Square, a dog stood by the side of the road.

It was thin and dirty, with patches of fur missing, one more stray in a city where stray animals rarely made anyone stop.

But I slowed down.

The dog looked at me.

Something about its eyes held me there.

They were wet, but it was more than that. There was a heaviness in them that I had seen before in people, in faces carrying a sadness too deep to hide. But I had never expected to recognise anything like it in the eyes of an animal.

And somehow, however irrationally, the sadness did not feel entirely turned inward. It did not seem to be only about hunger, pain or whatever life had done to this dog. There was something strangely outward about it, as though those eyes were carrying a grief that reached beyond themselves.

I had no reason to believe that.

It was simply what I felt.

For a few seconds, I looked back, confused by the weight I was placing on such a small moment. Then we drove on.

Later that night, lying in bed, the dog came back to me. Its face, its eyes and that strange sadness I could not quite place stayed with me until eventually I got out of bed and wrote a few lines.

I was not trying to write a book. I was simply trying to put somewhere else a feeling that would not leave me alone.

Somewhere on that page appeared an image I could not shake:

a dog crying humanity.

I cannot tell you exactly what I meant by those words.

That was twenty-six years ago and I was twenty years old. I knew there were things in the world that disturbed me, things that felt wrong long before I could explain why. But I did not yet have the words for what this book would eventually become.

I only knew that I had something to say.

So I kept the page.

I did not know those words would one day become the title of a book, or that I would return to them whenever something I believed could no longer survive what I had seen.

I only knew that something had happened beside the road in Martyrs’ Square that I could not keep inside of me.