Quotations: Montaigne's cat

'When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?' Montaigne's cat is famous but she is not quite the whimsical creature people have so often taken her for. For Descartes, animals are just machines, lacking that interior consciousness that is for him the exclusive mark of human beings. Montaigne's view is very different. Elsewhere he said, 'We entertain each other with reciprocal monkey tricks. If I have my time to begin or refuse, so she has hers.' It is an acknowledgement of life together in a common world where each each creature has its own way of perceiving that world, including of course some modes of sense perception wildly different from our own. 

There is something about Montaigne that suggests he sees the cat as wiser than the man. Their instinct seems better than our our human claims to knowledge that so often turn out to be presumptuous, mistaken and which all too often have disastrous consequences.But this disparagement of human aspirations attracted condemnation by people like Pascal and Bossuet in the seventeenth century. Montaigne's implicit appeal to toleration prompted a renewed intolerance.

Our relationships with animals today have been soaked through with commercial sentimentalism. Animals are 'cute', they do amusing tricks for us, the stuff of cartoons, films aimed at children show them, like Lassie, as heroically loyal companions faithful until death, or like Elsa, the lioness in Born Free we use them to serve our image of a paradise where there is no separation or conflict; and we give our pandas and other zoo animals absurd and degrading names; so much so, that we feel uncomfortable in their presence because it's so much like an Infants' School. Yet behind all this faintly unpleasant emotional overlay, we feel something like a sense of awe and wonder at the sheer difference, and, simultaneously, their extreme closeness. They are our closest companions in this once-in-a-lifetime show we call life. They remind us of companionship in a colder, less sentimental manner. They cast other eyes on the world. This is something that Montaigne expressed clearly centuries ago. You may find this all too obvious, but I don't think it is: people forget and need reminding of these basic conditions and aspects of life. Calling them to mind is not like taking an item from the shelves in a warehouse; it is more like seeing the world afresh and that if it is to carry any conviction calls upon a person's deepest experience of life.

Otto Dix was noted for his ruthless depictions of the brutality of war

'There are many strange things, but the strangest of all is man' (Sophocles)

Note: If members of our circle have quotations from any of our authors that you would like to publish and comment on, please send them to me. You can include an illustration if you can find something appropriate; otherwise, I shall look for one.