JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

There are many great books about cats: Natsume Soseki’s I Am A Cat (which Rene insists should be ‘We Are A Cat’) and T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats immediately spring to mind, and then there’s Saki’s alarming Tobermory. Perhaps the best of them is On Cats by Doris Lessing, which brings together her earlier works Particularly Cats, Rufus the Survivor, and The Old Age of El Magnifico in a single volume.

Danton Remoto gave us our copy ten years ago. Deeply moving but utterly unsentimental, On Cats is as dignified as its subjects. This is a book that cats would approve of.

“In the evenings people and the two resident cats, the rightful cats, were in the sitting room, and Rufus was under the bath. And then, one evening, Rufus appeared in the doorway of the sitting room, and it was a dramatic apparition, for here was the embodiment of the dispossessed, the insulted, the injured, making himself felt by the warm, the fed, the privileged. He glanced at the two cats, who were his rivals, but kept his intelligent eyes on us. What were we going to say? We said, Very well, he could use the old leather beanbag near the radiator, the warmth would help his aching bones. We made a hollow in the beanbag and he climbed into the hollow and curled up, but carefully, and he purred. He purred, he purred, he purred so loudly and so long we had to beg him to stop, for we could not hear ourselves speak. Literally. We had to turn up the television. But he knew he was lucky and wanted us to know he understood the value of what he was getting.”

– from Rufus the Survivor

The scraggly white stray cat who kept trying to run into our house in August.

Drogon today.