My Life as a Dog by Reidar Jonsson
The Sensitive Boy
It was a nice evening today and I sat round the back reading a book that’s been in my library for some years but never got round to reading it. Somehow, I began to think I was missing something. I had saw the movie many years back, but books are always better.
In My Life as a Dog, Ingemar, the young protagonist is growing up in 1950s Sweden. He retreats into comparisons with others who suffer more. He thinks of Laika, the Russian dog launched into orbit, circling the earth alone until her death. A boy should not have to console himself with the fate of a dog abandoned among the stars. Yet Ingemar does, because he feels too much, and the world gives him too little.
I think of the sensitive child, not unlike myself, who grew up in a home where life did not seem ideal. There were shadows in the corners of the room, arguments, silences, absences. A boy like that finds survival not in strength but in imagination. He tells himself stories. He compares his suffering to others’. He says, “It could be worse.”
But he feels everything. A harsh word doesn’t brush off him like dust from a jacket. It lingers. He reads the tension in a room, the disappointment in a parent’s face, the grief behind a closed door. He learns to be quiet, because sensitivity, in such a world, is mistaken for weakness. And yet, secretly, it is the only thing keeping him human.
What Ingemar teaches us is that sensitivity is not a flaw but a form of endurance. The sensitive child bears what others cannot because he feels what others refuse to notice. He grows into a man who understands sorrow, who can weep for Laika the dog, who can pity the neglected and defend the voiceless.
Juxtapose the two boys—the Swedish child in a rural town, and the child from any other city or home where love was never quite enough. Both had to make do with what was given, piecing together hope from scraps. Both learned to find perspective: one in the fate of a dog, the other perhaps in the quiet knowledge that the world, though cruel, is not without moments of unexpected kindness.
The moral, then, is not simply that we survive hardship, but that sensitivity, so often despised, is the very gift that allows us to survive with our souls intact. For what kind of life would it be if we could not weep for a dog sent into space, or for a child who grew up where life was less than ideal?