Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.

The speaker idealizes dogs as creatures unburdened by the moral and psychological afflictions humans project onto one another—envy, resentment, restless dissatisfaction. By calling them a “link to paradise,” the quote frames canine companionship as a temporary restoration of an Edenic state: presence without self-consciousness, leisure without guilt, and calm without the need for achievement. The hillside scene functions as a pastoral counter-image to modern life’s compulsions, suggesting that peace is not an accomplishment but a mode of being. The passage also implies a critique of human “knowledge of good and evil” as the source of alienation, with the dog representing innocence and uncomplicated affection.