Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 15

The cat here on earth

Modern totem

And intermittently decorative

In any case, this is true at our place. If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer cat food and have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next and leave their fur everywhere, and no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but, unfortunately, our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.

My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raging fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She’s vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue. It would seem that children believe for a fairly long time that anything that moves has a soul and is endowed with intention. My mother is no longer a child but she apparently has not managed to conceive that Constitution and Parliament possess no more understanding than the vacuum cleaner. I concede that the difference between the vacuum cleaner and the cats is that a cat can experience pain and pleasure. But does that mean it has a greater ability to communicate with humans? Not at all. That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects. When I hear my mother say, ‘Constitution is both a very proud and very sensitive little cat,’ when in fact said cat is sprawled on the sofa because she’s eaten too much, it really makes me want to laugh. But if you think about the hypothesis that a cat’s purpose is to act as a modern totem, a sort of emblematic incarnation, protector of the home, reflecting well upon its owners, then everything becomes clear. My mother makes the cats into what she wishes we were, and which we absolutely are not. You won’t find anyone less proud and sensitive than the three aforementioned members of the Josse family: Papa, Maman and Colombe. They are utterly spineless and anaesthetised, emptied of all emotion.

In short, in my opinion the cat is a modern totem. Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilisation and a ton of other ‘-tion’ words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they’re not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over their fate.