EULOGY TO A CAT

Today marks the 20th anniversary, to the day, of my living with Assia. She is not my first cat, but she has been a more continuous everyday presence in my life than anyone else—more than my wives, my parents, or my friends. For the past 27 years, I have lived with cats, and this is what I have to say: cats are not pets, nor are they companions in the way dogs are. They are purry manifestations of the Sublime, wrapped in indifference and laced with occasional condescension. Cats are too grand to be beautiful. Beauty is harmonious, inviting, manageable.

Cats, by contrast, are unpredictable, elusive, and entirely too comfortable with their own moral autonomy. They exist on the periphery of human understanding, slinking just outside the grasp of meaning. Their presence is felt but never fully understood. They are both here and elsewhere, capable of ignoring the laws of physics as they materialize in drawers and on bookshelves or vanish when it’s time to go to the vet.

Kant distinguishes between two types of Sublime: the mathematical, which concerns overwhelming vastness, and the dynamical, which involves nature’s terrifying power. Somehow, the cat manages to be both. It is mathematically Sublime in the way it perceives the world with an intelligence that remains forever beyond our comprehension. It sees things we do not see, hears frequencies we cannot hear, and, based on the way it stares at corners or into the void, is likely receiving messages from realms beyond human perception. A cat in repose is the perfect embodiment of an indifferent cosmos—a self-contained force that simply does not need you. This can be terrifying in its own way, which makes it dynamically Sublime as well.

A cat does not obey, does not submit, and when provoked, will demonstrate claws from without hesitation. This is nature’s power in its purest form—the perfect combination of grace and existential threat. The Sublime emerges at the point where the Symbolic Order (language, meaning, social norms) collapses in the face of something unassimilable. The cat is exactly that. It embodies the structure of desire: it remains distant even in closeness, it provokes longing but rarely fully grants itself, it haunts its owner with absence even in presence. You cannot predict it, and you certainly cannot impose language onto it. Unlike dogs, who exist within the domain of the Symbolic (they understand names, commands, rules), the cat resists the very notion of meaning. You may call its name, but whether it responds is not a function of recognition, but rather of pure, arbitrary will. You are not in control. You never were.

If there is a historical precedent for the cat’s mysterious role, it belongs to Orpheus—and his songs that express the longing for the unattainable. Orpheus sings of what can never be possessed, and this is exactly the human condition when living with a cat. You may feed it, care for it, provide warmth, and, on occasion, be blessed with affection—but you will never own it in any meaningful sense. The cat moves between presence and absence, existing within your space but not belonging to you. Like Orpheus’ song, its gaze lingers in a way that haunts you—one moment affectionate, the next as though contemplating your inevitable destruction. A cat is not a companion; it is an experience. Unlike the Sublime of the cosmos or the raging sea, the cat represents the Sublime made small, warm, and equipped with whiskers. An awe-inspiring object of reverence, a ‘known unknown’ (if one were to use Ramsfeld’s vocabulary), that happens to scratch your furniture, it is the only creature that inhabits your space while still belonging to another world. Its presence elicits an awareness of something joyously untamed beneath the surface of ordinary life.

The classical concept of the Sublime is external and overwhelming, but the cat internalizes the Sublime, carrying it within its own being. It refuses to be fully mastered, refuses to be reduced to mere pet or property, and in doing so, becomes an emissary of the everyday Sublime—an ordinary god, unreachable yet always near.

If we follow this thread further, we arrive at an even deeper function of the cat: as a psychopomp, a guide between worlds, a silent presence that does not resist death but moves with it. The ancient Egyptians already understood the cat’s liminal nature, often associating it with death and the afterlife. Unlike the dog, which is the embodiment of loyalty, presence, and devotion to life, the cat seems to know something about the other side, something it does not share but only acknowledges in its watchfulness. The cat does not mourn, nor does it panic in its presence— it simply accepts, existing as if it has already crossed the Styx many times before.

In this way, the cat is not only an emanation of the Sublime but also its messenger, leading us to the edge of what can be known and then slipping away, leaving only the trace of its presence. To live with a cat, then, is to live with a creature that has one paw in the Beyond. It is to welcome the Sublime into your home in its softest, most indifferent form—a reminder that some forces cannot be tamed, that beauty is not always comforting, and that you are, in fact, replaceable.