Lions and Cats

As Pete posted elsewhere this morning:

“For various reasons, I’ve been considering Lilith this morning, and in the online part of that consideration was led to this. Seems appropriate, really, except that Lily doesn’t even *purr*.”

The philosopher Wittgenstein said — or I’ve seen him quoted as saying — that if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. This is an interesting thought, although the more I think about it the less I agree with what it seems to imply about either language, or lions, or both. But my 365 Day Cat Calendar recently gave me an excellent quotation along somewhat the same lines. Nan Porter (who ought to be a philosopher) said: “If cats could talk, they wouldn’t.”

from Ursula K Le Guin