Snip from Rainer Maria Rilke's preface to Balthus' Mitsou (1921)

Does anyone know cats? Do you, for example, think that you do? I must admit I have always considered that their existence was never anything but shakily hypothetical.

For, if they are to share our world animals have somehow to participate in it. They must, to however small an extent, fall in with our way of life, tolerate it; else by their hostility or their fear they will merely measure the distance that separates them from us, and relations between us will consist solely in that.

Take dogs: the admiration and trust evidenced in their approach to us often make some of them seem to have abandoned their most primal canine traditions and turned to worship of our ways, and even of our faults. That is precisely what makes them tragic and sublime. Their determination to acknowledge us forces them to live at the very limits of their nature, constantly -- through the humanness of their gaze, their nostalgic nuzzlings -- on the verge of passing beyond them.

But what attitudes do cats adopt? Cats are just that: cats. And their world is utterly, through and through, a cat's world. You think they look at us? Has anyone ever truly known whether or not they deign to register for one instant on the sunken surface of their retina our trifling forms? As they stare at us they might merely be eliminating us magically from their gaze, eternally replete. True, some of us indulge our susceptibility to their wheedling and electric caresses. But, let such persons remember the strange, brusque, and offhand way in which their favorite animal frequently cuts short the effusions they had fondly imagined to be reciprocal. They too, even the privileged elected to enjoy their proximity of cats, have been rejected and denied time and time again, and even as they cherish some mysteriously apathetic creature in their arms they too have felt themselves brought up short at the threshold of a world that is a cat's world, a world inhabited exclusively by cats and in which they live in ways that no one of us can ever fathom.

Has man ever been their coeval? I doubt it. And I can assure you that sometimes, in the twilight, the cat next door pounces across and through my body, either unaware of me or as demonstrated to some eerie spectator that I really don't exist.

esprit de I'escalier

esprit de I'escalier (idiom)

A witty remark that occurs to you too late, literally on the way down the stairs. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines esprit de l'escalier as, "An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one's way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room."

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