"Like all pure creatures, cats are practical"
About this Quote
William S. Burroughs casts the cat as a model of undivided being: desire, perception, and action line up without fuss. Purity here is not moral innocence but freedom from the static of pretense. A cat does not posture to impress a tribe, nor rationalize its choices after the fact. It wants warmth, safety, food, and vantage, and it goes about securing them with an economy of steps. That is what he calls practical.
The line gains resonance from Burroughs late-life devotion to cats in Lawrence, Kansas, and from his slim, tender book The Cat Inside. The Beat provocateur of control systems and addiction found in cats a counterimage to human self-deception and institutional coercion. Where people are trained to perform for approval and to internalize surveillance, the cat keeps its own counsel. It calibrates risk without drama, negotiates territory with quietly emphatic signals, and refuses bad bargains. No wasted movement, no wasted emotion.
Calling cats pure aligns them with a Taoist sense of naturalness that Burroughs prized. Their practicality is not bean-counting but attunement. They conserve energy, retreat to heal, demand clean conditions, and give affection selectively and sincerely. Even their famous aloofness reads as strategy rather than mystique: by withholding indiscriminate attention, they protect the currency of their presence. A cat will meet you, but only as an equal party who honors boundaries.
Burroughs also hints at an artistic ethic. He sought methods that cut through manipulation to direct contact with experience, and he admired creatures that already inhabit such clarity. The cat demonstrates a way to live without the drag of ideology, to make choices that track reality as it is rather than as one wishes it to be. Practicality, in this sense, becomes a form of purity: a disciplined simplicity that rejects theatrics and aligns means with ends. To watch a cat is to see elegance born of necessity, and to be reminded that intelligence often looks like calm attention to what actually matters.
The line gains resonance from Burroughs late-life devotion to cats in Lawrence, Kansas, and from his slim, tender book The Cat Inside. The Beat provocateur of control systems and addiction found in cats a counterimage to human self-deception and institutional coercion. Where people are trained to perform for approval and to internalize surveillance, the cat keeps its own counsel. It calibrates risk without drama, negotiates territory with quietly emphatic signals, and refuses bad bargains. No wasted movement, no wasted emotion.
Calling cats pure aligns them with a Taoist sense of naturalness that Burroughs prized. Their practicality is not bean-counting but attunement. They conserve energy, retreat to heal, demand clean conditions, and give affection selectively and sincerely. Even their famous aloofness reads as strategy rather than mystique: by withholding indiscriminate attention, they protect the currency of their presence. A cat will meet you, but only as an equal party who honors boundaries.
Burroughs also hints at an artistic ethic. He sought methods that cut through manipulation to direct contact with experience, and he admired creatures that already inhabit such clarity. The cat demonstrates a way to live without the drag of ideology, to make choices that track reality as it is rather than as one wishes it to be. Practicality, in this sense, becomes a form of purity: a disciplined simplicity that rejects theatrics and aligns means with ends. To watch a cat is to see elegance born of necessity, and to be reminded that intelligence often looks like calm attention to what actually matters.
Quote Details
| Topic | Cat |
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