Tuesday, March 14, 2017

A Minute Observation

Nothing very profound here--just an observation by Joseph Wood Krutch on the long northern winters and various ways that some animals have found to handle them.

...as usual it is the cats who are provided with the most perfect mechanism.  They are, to be sure, capable of a kind of short-range impatience--when, for example, food is being prepared.  They seem at time to suffer momentarily from boredom, as a wild animal perhaps never does.  But when the weather is too bad to go out, or when for any reason there is absolutely nothing to do, they can simply curl up and sleep almost endlessly, for days at a time if necessary, with perfect ease.  Even going to sleep seems to be a process entirely under their control, as voluntary as shutting the eyes is for us.  Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia. 


Cats with insomnia:  sounds self-contradictory or mutually exclusive to me. 

9 comments:

  1. I will now enjoy a catnap. Thanks for the inspiration.

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    1. Tim,

      Catnaps are necessary for maintaining health and sanity.

      Enjoy. . .

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  2. Krutch is not much heard from nowadays; nice to be reminded of his excellent prose and nature descriptions... i think cats are blessed with an off/on switch which they use to tune out with: superior to us in that regard, i think...

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    1. Mudpuddle,

      I think cats are like small children in that respect: they both have on/off switches while we have rheostats.

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    2. Mudpuddle,

      Joseph Wood Krutch has been a long time favorite of mine, along with Loren Eiseley. I do a regular reading of both of them. According to the counter, I have seventeen post on Krutch and 27 on Eiseley.

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    3. eiseley used to be well know among college students but i haven't heard the name for a long time; i think i read one or two of his books back then, but i can't say for sure... congrats for your tenaciousness...

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    4. Mudpuddle,

      That must have been before or after my time. I was an undergraduate during the late 50's and early '60s. I first heard of Eiseley when I was in the USAF, sometime around '63 or maybe '64.

      I had a subscription to TIME Magazine and read an advertisement there for its TIME READING PROGRAM. It featured a paragraph from Eiseley's THE IMMENSE JOURNEY, and I was so impressed by that paragraph I signed up up for the program. It was there that I first read Eiseley and was also introduced to Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian ethologist.

      It was somewhat later that I encountered Joseph Wood Krutch, though just when and where and how is lost in the dim mists of history.

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  3. it may have been a local phenomenon, but i remember copies of Eiseley's works laying about in various locales in '62 and 3 when i first went to college...

    Keith Laumer was in the USAF also, i believe... his sci fi has been a favorite for most my life...

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    1. Mudpuddle,

      Interesting. That was about the time I discovered Eiseley in the Time advertisement, sometime around 62, 63, or 64. His popularity may have been why he was included in the TRP.
      I've been reading him ever since then--I have a large number of his works, and I always grab one every year or so and start rereading.

      I've read several of Laumer's works, but nothing recently.

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