Con especial atención para Jeffrey Bortz, Moo, Miriam Grunstein, Grisha, Colette, Sara Grunstein, Richard Salvucci,, Rafael Friedmann and all cat lovers... A race of civilized beings descended from the great cats would have been rich in hermits and solitary thinkers. The recluse would noy have been stigmatized as peculiar, as he is by us simians. They would not have been a credulous people, or easily religiuos. False prophets and swindlers would have found few dupes. And what generals thye would have made! what consumate politicians! They would never have become as poised or as placid as, say, super cows. Yet they would have had less insanity, probably, than we Monkeys minds seem precariously balanced, unstable. The great cats are saner. They are intense, they would have needed sanitariums: but fewer asylums. And their asylums would have been not for weakminded souls, but for furies. They would have been strong at slander. They would have been far more violent than we in their hates, and they would have had fewer frienships... The super-cat-women-men would have rated clealiness higher. Some of us primates have learned to keep ourselves clean, but it´s no large proportion; and even the cleanest of us see no grandeur in soap-manufacturing, and we don´t look to manicurists and plumbers for social prestige. A feline race woudl have honores such occupations...the rich Vera Pantherbilt would have designed only to dine with manicurists. None but the lowest dregs of such a race woul have been lawyers spending their span of life on this mysterious earth studing the long dusty records of dead and gone quarrels. We simians naturally admire a profession full of wonder and chatter, but that is a monkeyish way of deciding disputes, not a feline. It is fair to judge peoples by the rights they will sacrifice most for. Super.-cat-men-women would have been outraged had their right for personal combat been questioned. The simian submits with odd readiness to the loss of this privilege. What outrages him is to make him stop wagging his tongue. He becomes most excited and passionate about the right of free speech, even going so far in his emotion as to declare it sacred... In a world of super-cat-men-women, I suppose there would have been few sailors; and people would have cared less for seaside resorts, or for swiming... Among them thereve woudl have been no anti-vivisection societies; No Young Cats Christian Associations or Red Cross work: No vegetarians: No early closing laws: Much more hunting and traping: No riding to hounds; that´s pure simian,,, They would have had few comedies on their stage; no farces. Cats care Little for fun. In the circus, superlative acrobats. No clowns. in drama and singing they would have surpassed us probably. Even in the stage of arrested development as mere animals, in which we see cats, they wail with a passionate intensity at night in our yards. Imagine how a Carusso descendend from such beings would sing. From Clarence Day, The Simian World, Alfred A Knopf, 1920.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 04:00:15 +0000
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