Nature & Animals Quote by Carl Van Vechten

Van Vechten flatters the cat as muse, but the real target is the writerly ego that insists inspiration must arrive with a résumé. By insisting the cat "cannot be over-estimated", he knowingly overstates - a wink at the kind of aesthetic evangelism artists indulge when they dress private fixation up as universal principle. The exaggeration is the point: it turns a domestic animal into a portable theory of art.

Look at his inventory: "grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism". It reads less like zoology than a manifesto for modern style. Grace and motion are the cat as pure line and rhythm; power is self-possession; mysticism is the refusal to explain itself. The cat becomes an emblem of the artist's ideal: disciplined sensuality with a streak of secrecy. Even the sentence movement mimics what he admires - quick, elastic, accumulating.

The subtext is also social. In Van Vechten's era, cats carried a whiff of the bohemian, the decadent, the queer-coded domestic familiar: independent, nocturnal, aesthetically attuned, unimpressed by authority. Saying writers love cats is a way of aligning the writer with a creature that won't perform loyalty on command. It's an argument for art that values style over moral instruction, intuition over thesis.

The last line lands as sly provocation: he's "surprised" not everyone agrees because, in his view, any serious writer should recognize kinship with an animal that watches, waits, and pounces - the perfect metaphor for attention itself.