Skip to main content

March 22, 1832

 

March 22, 1832, is the date on which Goethe died. One of his early biographers relays this story which tells us about Goethe AND cats.

[His landlady had called Goethe to witness the amazing spectacle of her cat worshiping a bust Goethe kept of Jupiter, though the bust was to the landlady only, she thought, of some indeterminate deity]

Goethe inquired into the cause of her astonishment, [and] she answered, that her cat was worshipping it! She knew that her puss had as much sense as a Christian but this was really a miracle. "I hurried in, [Goethe said] and the sight was really strange enough— The cat had jumped on the table, and rested her paws on the breast of the god; she was just able, by stretching herself out, to reach his holy beard, which she kept licking with the greatest nicety, without allowing herself to be disturbed either by the exclamations of my landlady, or by my approach." Goethe left the good woman in her astonishment, though he conjectured, with considerable sagacity, that this singular piece of feline devotion had as little real devotion as his own morning devotion; and that 'some of the grease of the mould had attached itself to the beard of the bust, which puss (by the acuteness of her sense of smelling) had discovered, and was 'licking off.' Thus ends the merriest little story imaginable.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May 27, 1564

  May 27, 1564 John Calvin, a Protestant theologian who argued for predestination, was fond of his wife's cat,"Henriette." His wife and his wife's cat died in the same month, and according to J. Stephen Lang, author of 1,001 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Cats, Calvin did not get another wife or another cat. John Calvin died on May 27, 1564.
Post a Comment
Read more

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 8, 2006

 Raja Rao, the Indian writer credited for his authentic portrayal of Indian values in English publications died on July 8, 2006. From his obituary in The Guardian this description of two books Rao wrote. "Aiming at an ultimately positive encounter between east and west, Rao's metaphysical novel,  The Serpent and the Rope  (1960), displays an intellectuality that goes beyond the textual, through its metaphysical associations and a spiritual dimension that tells us much about the Indian and European worlds. His protagonist, Ramaswamy, entertains his friends with philosophical discussions ranging over an impressive set of themes - including Buddhism, theology, monasticism and world politics - while at the same time he charmingly invites the reader to envisage reality from his Hindu viewpoint, offering the key of distinguishing the projected reality of the serpent from the existing reality of the rope, an image derived from Shankara. ...[In a subsequent book,] Rao manages to ...
Post a Comment
Read more