This extract is from a short story by Doris Lessing.
It is about a 14-year-old girl
who chooses a puppy against the wishes of her mother.
CHOSEN
It was my father who decided we must have a dog, but choosing one turned out to
be more difficult than we thought. After my mother had turned down a dozen
puppies, we asked ourselves if any dog, anywhere in the world, could possibly be
good enough. But, when we found it, this new puppy was to be my dog. I had
decided this. And the fact was that I didn’t want a good, noble and well-bred dog –
the kind that my mother longed for. I didn’t know what I did want, but the idea of
such a dog bored me.
That summer we went to stay on an isolated farm with my father’s friend, Mr
Barnes. It was night when we arrived, and an almost full moon floated above the
farm. The land around was black and silent, except for the small incessant noise of
the crickets. The car drew up outside the farm and as the engine stopped there was
the sound of a mad, wild yapping. Behold, around the corner of the house came a
small black wriggling object that threw itself towards the car, changed course on
almost touching it, and dashed off again. ‘Take no notice of that puppy,’ said Mr
Barnes. ‘It’s been stark staring mad with the moon every night this last week.’
We went into the house and were fed and looked after. I was sent upstairs so that
the grown-ups could talk freely. All the time came the mad high yapping. In my
tiny bedroom I looked out onto the space between the house and the farm
buildings, and there hurtled the puppy, crazy with the joy of life, or moonlight,
weaving back and forth, snapping at its own black shadow – like a drunken moth
around a candle-flame, or like … like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of since.
That, of course, was my puppy. Mr. Barnes came out of the house saying, ‘Come
now, you lunatic animal…’, almost throwing himself on the crazy creature, which
was yapping and flapping around like a fish as he carried it to its kennel. I was
already saying, like an anguished mother watching a stranger handle her child:
‘Careful now, careful, that’s my dog.’
Next day, after breakfast, I went to announce my decision. My mother at once said:
‘Oh no, not that puppy. We’ll never be able to train him.’ Mr. Barnes said I could
have him with pleasure. My father said he didn’t see anything wrong with the dog,
if a dog was healthy that was all that mattered: my mother sighed and sat silent.
The atmosphere of adults disagreeing with each other was familiar to me. I didn’t
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say a word. I simply knew that things would work themselves out, and the puppy
would be mine. Was right on my side? It was. Should anybody but myself choose
my dog? No. Very well then, I had chosen. I chose this dog. I chose it.
Too late, I had chosen it. Three days and three nights we spent at the Barnes’ place.
On the last night of our stay I crept out in the cold moonlight to sit and watch the
tiny, black, hurtling puppy. When I finally went to my bed, I fell asleep dreaming
of the little dog with brown, buttony, beautiful eyes, and I knew I couldn’t leave
him behind.
We took him away next morning. It was a long drive home and all the way the
puppy yawned and wriggled on my lap, then lay on its fat back, its four paws
sprawled every-which-way. My father demanded irritably that the dog should be
‘thoroughly trained’, and I answered ‘yes’, only half hearing him. My head ran in
circles like the puppy’s own wild movements, dizzy with a mixture of joy and
alarm. This was my dog. My responsibility.
In this article, the writer explores the impact of the increasing amount of choice
people have today
SPOILT FOR CHOICE?
Have you ever panicked when faced with too much choice and not been able to
decide what to eat in the canteen? Or which flavor crisps to buy? Or what channel
to watch on TV? You are not alone. We now have so much choice in our lives that
psychologists believe it is making us unhappy.
Most superstores provide us with more than 40,000 products and each year they
add more: one major supermarket chain boasts that they sell 146 different kinds of
cereal, 60 kinds of bread and over 400 soft drinks. They even sell 36 different
kinds of milk! Of course, it doesn’t stop at groceries – just think of the choice there
is when it comes to clothes, shoes, accessories, mobile phones, DVDs, gadgets ...
According to Barry Schwartz, an expert in human behaviour, people like having
some choice, for example deciding which cereal to have for breakfast. But if
people feel they are constantly being bombarded by a hail of products, they end up
finding it difficult to make a choice at all. Schwartz explains what happened when
he found himself trying to buy a pair of jeans: ‘I just wanted to buy an ordinary
pair. But I discovered that they didn’t exist anymore. Instead there were relaxed fit,
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easy fit, button fly, zip fly, boot-leg, stone-washed... The jeans I got were OK, but
because there were so many to choose from and I’d spent so much time searching,
I thought they’d be perfect - but they weren’t!’
David Shanks, another expert, supports Schwartz’s view:
‘Firstly, so much choice makes decision-making increasingly complex.
Secondly, we feel bad every time we do make a choice because it seems we are
missing out on other opportunities.
And this makes us feel unhappy with what we have chosen. We only think about
what we still want to buy, rather than appreciating what we have.’
Experiments suggest that the less choice we have, the easier it is to choose. For
example, people who were offered six kinds of jam to choose from, bought more
jam than those who were offered 24 different varieties to try.
Another experiment showed that giving students a choice of fewer essay topics
made them produce better work. Yet the number of consumer choices available to
us continues to multiply and we are still seduced by the idea that more choice must
be better. So every shopping trip becomes a marathon task. But if all this choice is
actually causing us stress, what can we do about it? We could stop worrying about
everyday choices and save our decision-making effort for serious things that really
merit time and effort. We need to live in the moment, appreciate what we have and
not think about all the other things that we could choose instead.
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