On Cats, by Doris Lessing
I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the positive side, Lessing is an excellent writer (as anyone not living in a cave is well aware) and her affection for cats is unquestioned, particularly her willingness to spend tremendous time, effort and money nursing sick cats, even when they're strays.
Also remarkable is her sensitivity to the nature of cats and awareness of their unique personalities, which I think is well demonstrated here in an excerpt about grey cat and black cat, the main felines in this memoir:
Last week I trod on grey cat's tail by mistake: she let out a squawk, and black cat leaped in for a kill: instant reflex. Grey cat had lost favour and protection, so black cat thought, and this was her moment.
I apologized to grey cat, petted them both. They accepted these attentions, watching each other all the time, and went their separate ways to their separate saucers, their separate sleeping places. Grey cat rolls on the bed, yawns, preens, purrs: favourite cat, boss cat, queen cat by right of strength and beauty.
Black cat tends to settle these days -- there are no kittens around for the moment -- in a corner of the hallway where she has her back to the wall, and can check on invaders from the garden, and watch grey cat's movements up and down the stairs.
When she dozes off, eyes half-closed, she becomes what she really is, her real self when not tugged into fussy devotion by motherhood. A small sleek, solid little animal, she sits, a black, black cat with her noble, curved, aloof profile.
'Cat frome the Shades! Plutonic cat! Cat for an alchemist! Midnight cat!'
But black cat is not interested in compliments today, she does not want to be bothered. I stroke her back; it arches slightly. She lets out half a purr, in polite acknowledgement to the alien, then gazes ahead into the hidden world behind her yellow eyes.
On the negative side, it appears that until fairly late in her life she was opposed to "fixing" cats, considering neutering and spaying unnatural and an insult to the cat's nature, or possibly nature as a whole, I'm not really clear on that. In any case, her defense of her position was that "pregnancy was natural" and so was her solution to too many kittens -- killing them. My opinion on this is that while pregnancy is natural, so are the effects of excessive pregnancy: starvation, homelessness and early death. And that the natural results of being stupid about sex are horrifying enough to warrant doing an end run around nature. After awhile I started to feel faintly sick at the endless pregnancies of one or another of her female cats, tho I still consider the book worth reading.
Also remarkable is her sensitivity to the nature of cats and awareness of their unique personalities, which I think is well demonstrated here in an excerpt about grey cat and black cat, the main felines in this memoir:
Last week I trod on grey cat's tail by mistake: she let out a squawk, and black cat leaped in for a kill: instant reflex. Grey cat had lost favour and protection, so black cat thought, and this was her moment.
I apologized to grey cat, petted them both. They accepted these attentions, watching each other all the time, and went their separate ways to their separate saucers, their separate sleeping places. Grey cat rolls on the bed, yawns, preens, purrs: favourite cat, boss cat, queen cat by right of strength and beauty.
Black cat tends to settle these days -- there are no kittens around for the moment -- in a corner of the hallway where she has her back to the wall, and can check on invaders from the garden, and watch grey cat's movements up and down the stairs.
When she dozes off, eyes half-closed, she becomes what she really is, her real self when not tugged into fussy devotion by motherhood. A small sleek, solid little animal, she sits, a black, black cat with her noble, curved, aloof profile.
'Cat frome the Shades! Plutonic cat! Cat for an alchemist! Midnight cat!'
But black cat is not interested in compliments today, she does not want to be bothered. I stroke her back; it arches slightly. She lets out half a purr, in polite acknowledgement to the alien, then gazes ahead into the hidden world behind her yellow eyes.
On the negative side, it appears that until fairly late in her life she was opposed to "fixing" cats, considering neutering and spaying unnatural and an insult to the cat's nature, or possibly nature as a whole, I'm not really clear on that. In any case, her defense of her position was that "pregnancy was natural" and so was her solution to too many kittens -- killing them. My opinion on this is that while pregnancy is natural, so are the effects of excessive pregnancy: starvation, homelessness and early death. And that the natural results of being stupid about sex are horrifying enough to warrant doing an end run around nature. After awhile I started to feel faintly sick at the endless pregnancies of one or another of her female cats, tho I still consider the book worth reading.