Erin examines the subject of Cats.

To my knowledge, no animal inspires more controversy than the cat. Indeed, the feline species is the only subject about which I have seen my parents publicly argue (my mother sees cats as nominally mammalian, actually angelic, while my father, finding all social constraints removed, would savor feeding one to a pack of wild dogs). But my parents' disagreement ought not to suggest that this opposition is localized or trivial. Many of our greatest thinkers have taken up the subject: Mark Twain, Albert Schweitzer, Jean Cocteau. Indeed, T.S. Eliot associates felines and the divine in his poem "The Naming of Cats" when he describes the name each cat keeps to himself:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable, effable,
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name

Not only does the cat's secret name recall a prophecy in the book of Revelations, a prophecy for a time when man will be restored to his un-Fallen and perfected state ("To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it."), but here we also have a picture of the Father's role in the Holy Trinity, what Sergei Bulgakov calls "intelligence contemplating itself (noesis tes nueseos)".

But clearly this is ridiculous, for after all a cat is just an animal--an animal that licks his hind end in public, like a mere dog. And the dog-lover will remind us that so far from being divine, the cat actually scorns those who love it, and indeed at times scorns those whom he loves. This is no divinity; this is a spoiled child with a gift for manipulation.

So as I enter Cat Ownership for the first time, I must ask myself about the nature of the cat's power over me. After all, my family is fearful that not even marriage will save me from embodying the crazy cat lady stereotype. And Philip and I joke (with apologies to Blaise Pascal) that I have a cat-shaped hole in my heart. In the depths of my heart, I suspect an ulterior motive for my obsession: self-gratification. This creature who sees me as at best his personal masseuse (and at worst his capricious and irresponsible servant) does, from time to time, deign to sit upon my lap and accept my doting attentions. Perhaps, if this superior being will let me approach him, I may not be so bad after all?

And indeed I found, in Irish writer Robert Lynd's essay "Cats," a beautiful summation of this experience in which a human ("in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!") voluntarily humbles himself in order to receive the approval of a single cat:

"On the other hand, part of the fascination of cats may be due to the fact that it is so difficult to come to an understanding with them. A man talks to a horse or a dog as to an equal. To a cat he has to be deferential as though it had some Sphinx-like quality that baffled him. . . . One feels, as one listens [to a purring cat], like a humble lover in a bad novel, who says: "You do, then, like me--a little--after all?" The fact that a cat is not utterly miserable in our presence always comes with the freshness and delight of a surprise."