Great Essays of All Nations/Cats

by Karel Čapek

For works with similar titles, see Cat.

KAREL ČAPEK

Karel Čapek, Ph.D., was born in 1890 at Malé Svatoňovice under the Giant Mountains in North Bohemia. He is best known abroad as a bold and stimulating dramatist and inventor of the “Robots.” The author of cleverly constructed plays, The Freebooter, R. U. R., The Makropulos Affair, and joint-author of daring philosophical revues, The Life of the Insects and Adam the Creator, he has won also much distinction as writer of fantastic fiction and witty essays. His consummate mastery in the drawing of character is best revealed in his Unpleasant Stories, perhaps the finest collection of short stories in the Czech language. The most popular of his essays are his gently satirical Letters from England, a series of travelling sketches contributed to his paper Lidové Noviny for which he writes regularly. An optimistic “pragmatist” philosophy and the Chestertonian mirth of his essays strangely contrasts with the deep pessimism underlying his dramas and with the gloomy atmosphere of his best stories.

The following essay from Of Intimate Things has been specially translated for this collection by Dora Round by the author’s permission.

CATS

ILL anyone explain to me why a cat gets so strangely excited if you whistle to her very shrill and high? I have tried it with English, Italian, and German cats; there is no geographical distinction: when the cat hears your whistling (especially if you whistle “Night of stars and night of love” as high as you can), she begins to rub against you fascinated, jumps on to your knee, sniffs at your lips in surprise, and finally in rapturous excitement she begins to bite passionately at your mouth and nose with an expression disfigured by voluptuousness; on which you of course stop, and she begins to purr hoarsely and energetically like a small motor. I have thought about it time and again, and I don’t know to this day from what age-old instinct cats adore whistling; I do not believe that at any time in the primeval era there was an age when male cats whistled shrilly instead of yowling in metallic and strident alto as they do to-day. Perhaps in distant and savage times there lived some cat gods who used to speak to their cat believers by means of magical whistling; but this is a mere hypothesis, and the above-mentioned fascination of music is one of the riddles of the cat soul.

Man thinks that he knows cats just as he thinks he knows people. A cat is a thing which sleeps curled up in the armchair, sometimes prowls about its cat-affairs, sometimes knocks over the ash-tray, and spends the greater part of its life in passionate pursuit of warmth. But the secret essence of cat-hood I only realized in Rome; and that because I was looking not at one cat but at fifty cats, at a whole herd of cats in the great cat basin round Trajan’s Column. The old excavated Forum lies like a basin in the middle of the square; and at the bottom of this dry basin, among broken pillars and statues, lives the independent cat nation; it lives on fishes' heads which the kind-hearted Italians thrown down from above, practises some cult of the moon, and beyond this it clearly does nothing. Now, it was revealed to me there that a cat is not simply a cat but something enigmatic and impenetrable; that a cat is a wild creature. If you see two dozen cats walking about you are surprised by the sudden realization that a cat doesn’t walk at all, she slinks. A cat among people is just a cat; a cat among cats is a skulking shadow in the jungle. A cat clearly trusts a man; but she doesn't trust a cat; because she knows it better than we. We say “cat and dog” as the example of social mistrust; I, however, have often seen very intimate friendship between cat and dog; but I have never seen an intimate friendship between two cats; this is, of course, not speaking of feline love-affairs. The cats in Trajan’s Forum ignore each other most ostentatiously; if they sit on the same pillar, they sit with their backs toward each other and nervously twitch their tails to make it plain that they put up with the presence of these disreputable neighbours of theirs against their will. If cat looks at cat, she spits; if they meet, they do not look at each other; they never have a common aim; they never have anything to say to each other. At the best of times they tolerate each other in contemptuous and negative silence.

But with you, a man, the cat will talk; she purrs to you, looks up into your eyes and says: “Man, please open this door for me; you valiant trencherman, do give me some of what you’re eating; stroke me; talk to me; let me come on to my armchair.” With you she is not a wild, lone shadow; for you she is simply a domestic pussycat, because she trusts you. A wild animal is an animal which is mistrustful. Domestication is simply a state of trustfulness.

And you know, we human beings are only not wild as long as we trust each other. If I—for instance—on leaving home distrusted the first neighbour I met, I should edge near to him growling darkly with every muscle in my thighs tense, ready to spring at his throat at the flicker of an eyelash. If I distrusted the people with whom I travel by tram, I should have to keep my back to the wall and spit like a cat to frighten them; instead of which I hang peacefully on to my strap and read the paper, offering them my unprotected back. If I walk along the street, I am thinking of my work or of nothing at all, without giving a thought to what the passers-by might do to me; it would be awful if I had to eye them askance to see that they were not preparing to devour me. A state of mistrust is the original state of wildness; mistrust is the law of the jungle.

A policy which thrives by stimulating mistrust is a policy of wildness. A cat who distrusts a man sees in him not a man but a wild animal; the man who distrusts another man sees in him a wild animal too. The bond of mutual trust is older than all civilization and culture; and it is more important. You can destroy civilization, and humanity will still be humanity; but if you destroy the state of trust, the world of men becomes a beast-ridden earth.

To show you now, I will go and stroke my own pussycat; she is a great comfort to me because she trusts me, although she is only a little grey beast who has strayed in to me from God knows what corner of the unknown wilds of Prague’s back alleys. She starts purring and looks up at me. “Man,” she says, “do rub me between my ears.”