"These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north"
About this Quote
Campfire talk, but tilted just enough to feel uncanny: Simak opens a door into a world where “stories” are not merely entertainment but a species of memory with its own custodians. The capitalization of “Dogs” is the sly tell. It grants them personhood, even authority, while also suggesting a future (or alternate present) in which humans are no longer the default narrators. Simak’s intent isn’t to anthropomorphize for cuteness; it’s to relocate culture itself into a different set of mouths, and to let that displacement do the emotional work.
The sentence is built like an oral tradition’s pressure valve. “When the fires burn high” signals intimacy and protection against darkness; it’s an invitation to listen. Then “the wind is from the north” adds menace and geography in one stroke: north as cold front, as winter, as the direction trouble arrives from. The specificity matters. This isn’t a generic bedtime-story setup; it’s a ritual conditioned by weather, by season, by the body’s awareness of vulnerability. Stories appear when survival feels contingent.
In context, Simak’s fiction often treats the pastoral as a veneer over deep time and deep change: small-town textures haunted by evolution, alienation, post-human succession. The subtext here is elegiac. If dogs are the ones telling stories, something has happened to us. Yet the line isn’t bitter. It’s tender, even hopeful: whatever comes after humanity still gathers, still remembers, still makes meaning while the world howls outside.
The sentence is built like an oral tradition’s pressure valve. “When the fires burn high” signals intimacy and protection against darkness; it’s an invitation to listen. Then “the wind is from the north” adds menace and geography in one stroke: north as cold front, as winter, as the direction trouble arrives from. The specificity matters. This isn’t a generic bedtime-story setup; it’s a ritual conditioned by weather, by season, by the body’s awareness of vulnerability. Stories appear when survival feels contingent.
In context, Simak’s fiction often treats the pastoral as a veneer over deep time and deep change: small-town textures haunted by evolution, alienation, post-human succession. The subtext here is elegiac. If dogs are the ones telling stories, something has happened to us. Yet the line isn’t bitter. It’s tender, even hopeful: whatever comes after humanity still gathers, still remembers, still makes meaning while the world howls outside.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dog |
|---|
More Quotes by Clifford
Add to List
