Life & Mortality Quote by Erica Jong

Jong turns a traveler's throwaway observation into a sly manifesto about how we romanticize place. The line is a double hallucination: first, the stones "thick with history" as if the past is a physical substance you can scrape under your nails; then the cats, those stubbornly ordinary animals, promoted into "ghosts of the famous dead". It works because it’s both indulgent and self-aware. You can hear the wink in "must surely" - a mock certainty that signals she knows she’s making it up, and also that making it up is part of the point.

The intent isn’t to prove the supernatural; it’s to dramatize what happens when a writer walks into an old city and feels pressured to have the correct epiphany. History becomes atmosphere, a kind of aesthetic fog, and the mind goes hunting for mascots to carry it. Cats are perfect for this: they’re local, ubiquitous, and unbothered by your reverence. Casting them as the "famous dead" flatters the traveler (look how sensitively I’m receiving the past) while gently mocking the idea that greatness lingers in a tidy, legible form.

There’s also a feminist-artist subtext typical of Jong: the canon is male, monumental, stone. She slips that authority into a feline disguise - quick, peripheral, hard to pin down. The alleyway becomes an alternative archive, where legacy isn’t a statue; it’s something that darts, refuses capture, and survives by staying sideways to official history.