One Creature Declined the Offer of Work.

Sometime around 1580, in a round library at the top of a tower in Périgord, the most honest man in Europe looked up from his page and lost an argument with his cat. "When I play with my cat," Montaigne wrote, "how do I know that she is not passing her time with me, rather than I with her?" He had painted the beams of that library with Greek and Latin maxims to keep his vanity under supervision, and his motto, carved into a medal he had struck for himself, was a question: what do I know? The cat contributed the better question, without striking a medal, and then, the record suggests, went back to sleep.

Consider what she represented, lying there among the folios. Of all the creatures that moved into our houses at the beginning of things, the cat alone declined employment. The dog took a job on arrival, several jobs in fact: herding, guarding, retrieving, and eventually the strange modern position of enthusiast, since even joy is a duty a dog performs. The horse signed the worst contract in nature and has been working it off ever since. The cat came differently. Nine and a half thousand years ago, on Cyprus, someone was buried with a cat beside him, an arrangement older than the pyramids; and the scholars who study domestication tell us, with visible admiration, that the cat domesticated herself. She appeared at the granaries of the first farmers, where the mice were, and offered a treaty of exactly one clause: I will be near the grain. Nothing further has ever been added. She is the only worker in history who wrote her own terms and has never once been called in to renegotiate them.

The terms, examined closely, amount to a philosophy. A cat sleeps sixteen hours a day and offers no explanation, because she has none to offer and would not offer it if she had. She is never recharging, never recovering, never resting strategically in preparation for some later output; the sleep is not in service of the waking, and this is precisely what distinguishes her from every human sleeper in the modern world. The purr, our scientists have established, is produced at rest as well as in pleasure, which means it is not a report of usefulness but a broadcast of contentment, issued on a frequency the household is free to enjoy. She keeps a full diary of appointments, all of them with sunbeams, and misses none. And she performs her stretches to the standard of an art form, though no one is judging and nothing depends on it, which may be the definition of art the aestheticians have been circling for centuries.

Scholars have always known she was one of them, or rather that they aspired to be one of her. In the ninth century an Irish monk, bent over his manuscript in a monastery far from home, wrote a small poem in the margin about his white cat: I and Pangur Bán my cat, it begins, 'tis a like task we are at; the monk hunts words, the cat hunts mice, two professionals sharing a cell, each absorbed and neither interfering. Nine hundred years later Christopher Smart, locked in an asylum for the crime of praying too loudly in public places, spent his confinement composing Jubilate Agno, which contains seventy-odd lines considering his cat Jeoffry, the tenderest audit ever conducted of a colleague: for he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes; for he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. The maddest poet in England and the sanest creature in the building, sharing a room. And the story is told of the Prophet himself that he found his cat Muezza asleep on the sleeve of his robe when the hour of prayer arrived, and cut off the sleeve rather than wake her. The story may not be true. It deserves to be, which is a separate and in some ways higher qualification.

Officially, we keep cats for companionship, an explanation that collapses under the lightest interrogation, since the cat's companionship is intermittent, conditional, and scheduled entirely at her convenience. I propose we keep them as tuition. A cat is a live-in demonstration, renewed daily, that a life can be entirely without output and entirely without shame; she is the only ascetic who owns nothing, wants nothing, and has renounced nothing, since renunciation would imply the desire had existed. Every household with a cat contains one being who has solved the problem the rest of the household is working on. We call her the pet. The arrangement flatters us, and she permits the flattery, the way monarchs permit portraits.

Humanity has tried, periodically, to put her on the payroll, and the experiments repay study. The British government has employed an official Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, with a title, a public following, and no measurable output; ships' cats crossed every ocean of the age of sail, nominally on pest duty, actually on morale duty, which they discharged by sleeping in coils of rope; libraries and bookshops from Alexandria to the present have kept cats whose contribution to the catalogue is nil and whose contribution to the institution is somehow structural. Notice the pattern: even when we succeed in employing a cat, she declines to experience it as employment. The mice get caught, when they get caught, as a private matter between her and the mice. The salary, the title, the position: these are things happening to us, not to her. She has never once confused what she does with what she is, a distinction whole civilizations of working men have failed to keep straight.

She watches us work, it should be noted, with what I can only describe as anthropological pity. From the shelf, from the windowsill, from the exact center of whatever document is most urgent, she observes the species that invented the alarm clock, the standing meeting, and the productivity application, and she draws no conclusion aloud. Then she does the correct thing, which is nothing, superbly.

Montaigne never answered his own question, which was the honest outcome; he filed it among the evidence that we understand animals no better than they trouble to understand us, and went on writing the book that taught Europe how to be uncertain in good faith. His cat, having posed the question and won the exchange, is not recorded as having pursued the advantage. I imagine she returned to the window, where the serious work of the afternoon was waiting for her, in a rectangle of sun.