Writers have speculated about the inner lives of cats for centuries. Under lockdown, my curiosity grows too

The other day I let my girlfriend cut my hair. I sat on a stool in the bath while she trimmed it with nail scissors, discarded curls collecting around my toes. I’m relieved to be rid of the split ends. But more so, I’m glad that the chop seems to have put a stop to one of our two cats acting as a small, purring alarm clock.

Previously this cat had been waking me daily at 7am under the misapprehension that I was a fellow feline in need of grooming. I understand the confusion. If I were her, I too would have observed the cloud of frizz across the pillow and got to work detangling with my teeth. I’ve seen her do it to her brother many times, a fierce tussle morphing into maternal fussing as she pins him down and briskly licks the fur between his ears. Annoying as it was, I found myself strangely touched that she afforded me the same intimacy.

I have spent a lot of time recently putting myself into the mindset of a cat. I’d like to claim that it’s a pastime borne entirely of the unprecedented number of hours currently spent stuck indoors, but any pet owner would know I was lying. It begins the minute an animal enters a home. From the moment we become responsible for keeping these creatures alive we observe them closely, noting their funny habits, sleep patterns, and the minutiae of personality, physicality, even bowel movements. We wreath them in nicknames and narrate their lives, speculating about their inner worlds and discussing them as though they share all those messy human feelings like resentment, longing, and shame. At first it’s a novel form of entertainment. Over time it becomes an integral part of loving them.

Lockdown has definitely upped the narrative stakes though. With the two of us constantly rattling around the house with less work than usual and more time than ever, the focus on our cats has reached fever pitch. It’s evidently endemic. WhatsApp notifications spill in from friends updating us on the comic foibles and complex sensibilities of their own feline companions. Our next door neighbour has taken to promenading her vast, hairy cat around her backyard once a day, cradled like a baby princeling as she softly talks to it. We had never seen it before lockdown.

Heightened interest in the rich inner lives of cats is nothing new. As a species, humans are obsessed with knowing what our pets may or may not be thinking. Scientific studies try to settle whether cats properly love their owners, or if they would kill us but for the disparity in size and strength. We give them endless affection and care, and are desperate for some sign that it’s reciprocated—even as we know, deep down, that pet ownership is a necessarily asymmetrical and quite weird form of inter-species relationship.

Over the centuries cats have been worshipped, feared, welcomed for their mouse-catching abilities, and absorbed into family life—and written about. Some have attempted to imagine the world through their eyes. Many, particularly children’s authors, have anthropomorphized them: the braggadocio of Puss-in-Boots or the cunning and smug logic of Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat. Uncharitable stereotypes abound. Where dogs are eager to please, cats are slinky and aloof.

A third group have committed themselves to honest observation of cat psychology. In the same way that the Impressionists turned away from a set number of Scenes Worth Painting (think The Bible and general, gleaming antiquity) in favour of showing the beauty of the mundane, these writers have also sought to illuminate the smallest details of domestic cathood and the particular relationship between human and feline. As writer Vivian Gornick observed in the New York Review of Books, “I don’t think I’ve ever in my life wondered as much about the mercurial motivation of a living creature’s behavior as I have watching the cats.”

The cats Gornick refers to are her own. Two sisters, she acquires them as kittens and is dismayed at their lack of immediate affection for her. Years later she comes to understand them through watching the way they interact with one another, enjoying their company only once she puts aside her own hurt feelings. Her realisation frames a wider essay on Doris Lessing’s crisp, compact masterpiece On Cats: in it, Gornick does what we all want to do when writing on someone else’s cats, which is to make it about our own.

Lessing, a famously sharp writer of fiction and essays who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, was the ultimate chronicler of cats. In On Cats she relays with wry, sometimes brutal precision the stories of all the cats she’s known, rescued, lost, and owned. Some stories are terribly sad. Lessing grew up in Zimbabwe, where semi-feral cats abounded and sometimes needed to be put to death. But she loved cats, and their stories form the backbone of the book. Some engage in elaborate psychodrama, rival pets vying for power. The ongoing stand-off between grey cat—haughty, gorgeous, “a miniature lion steel-clawed for murder”—and black cat—softer, sweeter, made for mothering kittens—is vividly drawn. Rufus the Survivor is stoic and grateful. El Magnifico is named as such because no other name would befit him. Each of them becomes an intricate character study, but as in all character studies, it is as much a portrait of the writer as it is the written.

At the end of the book, Lessing writes “I dream of cats often… I have responsibilities for them, for dreams of cats are always reminders of duty. The cats need feeding, or need shelter. If our dream worlds are not the same… then when [El Magnifico] sleeps, where does he travel?” I have thought a lot about this in recent weeks. In lockdown, our worlds shrink. We attend to the needs of those within them, as best we can. I could ask, like Lessing, what my cats make of all this. Sometimes I study them, pondering what goes on behind those watchful yellowy-green eyes. As the human lives around them momentously transform, what does this landscape of sofas, unworn shoes and constantly present laps look like to them? I wonder if they know what solace they provide.