For the cat devotee, a few literary selections to enhance your appreciation of divinity
Cats, like mayonnaise and Donald Trump, have their deeply loyal partisans and sworn enemies. Are they an invasive species contributing to the extinction of more than 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles in the wild? Or are they defenseless fur babies who make biscuits in your lap, are scared by cucumbers, and keep you from getting a good night’s sleep by adorably hogging the bed?
Both things can be true, as they say. But controversy aside, cats have played an inspirational role for many a literary figure. Below is a small smattering of our favorite feline-centric works.
For cat lovers who like their literature bittersweet, nobody wrote about love better than the late Alice Adams, who was also a cat devotee. Her story “The Islands,” from the collection “The Last Lovely City,” begins: “What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire, and unambivalent way that some of us do?” The rest of the piece seeks to answer that question, following a woman — and her beloved cat — over the course of a marriage, a death, and a new beginning.
Those who prefer a more epic read will find much to contemplate in Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Cats are a theme in all of the Japanese superstar novelist’s works, but in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” a cat is the catalyst, propelling its owner’s descent into a parallel netherworld of political intrigue, existential menace, and the excavation of forgotten brutalities during the Japanese campaign in Manchuria in World War II. A good argument for keeping your cat indoors.
And finally, T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” may have spawned a hit musical, but for a more modern poetic take on the cat, consider Margaret Atwood’s “February,” from her collection “Morning in the Burned House”: ”Winter. Time to eat fat / and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat / a black fur sausage with yellow / Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries / to get onto my head. It’s his / way of telling whether or not I’m dead.”
A familiar enough scene for cat owners, but Atwood spins the morning kibble call into a meditation on sex and death. In the hot ‘n’ heavy yowls of the neighborhood tomcats, Atwood finds a pagan hope: “Cat! Enough of your greedy whining / and your small pink bumhole. / Off my face! You’re the life principle, / more or less, so get going . . . Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.”
Go forth, cat friends, and make 2024 fruitful.