Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

by John Gray

Society forms a sort of biological culture in which individuals can try out all the means by which they can make contact with one another … Love is born there … But, more than anything else, what flourishes in all its forms is the need for ‘diversion’ in the Pascalian sense of the word. ‘Diversion’ for society people is the art of using others for the sole purpose of satisfying one’s needs and disguising one’s boredom. Where affections are concerned, this exploitation can be admitted neither to oneself nor to others. That is why Proust’s characters hide, dissemble, and betray one another. They lie to themselves and to each other under various pretexts, hiding their real motives … Possessing both money and leisure, left entirely to its own devices, the social set has only one deep-rooted desire: to be protected from the emptiness of existence and to draw from the sterile and disquieting substance of life a mask which is reassuring and flattering to itself … They want neither to understand nor to know, only to be adorned and amused.