In 1813 John James Audubon returned to his family in Kentucky after a
long trip finding and studying birds. Upon opening a trunk that
had contained over two hundred drawings of birds, he found a pair of
Norway rats had been raising a family inside, turning most of his
artwork into urine-soaked tatters.
        More often than the uncomplimentary--and not always apt--analogy of
rats in a trunk, the condition of human beings in the universe has been
compared to that of cats in a library. Creatures of many admirable
traits, cats nevertheless can have only a very primitive understanding
of a library. Given only an hour or two, they'll wander
among the bookshelves, completely oblivious of their contents. My own
cats loved to sniff a stack of borrowed library books I brought home,
with all their intriguing mixed scents of food and sweat and tobacco.
Patrons of my local library have been known to leave a slice of ham,
presumably used as a bookmark, in a returned volume. Given the run of a
library over a longer period however, cats will eventually knock all the
books to the floor and use them as litter. Not unlike the rats, in the
final analysis.
        A being of broader and more complex understanding might look at mankind
in a similar way. We seem to poke curiously around, interested
mostly in personal gratification, often with only a vague notion of the
meaning of the things we find and disturb. Like Audubon's rats, we have
been able to prosper and reproduce our kind--and hence succeed by many
biological criteria--based on the destruction of things we have not
understood.
        All too often we behave like rats in the environment we inherit, and
often enough like cats with regard to the great works of nature. Cats
may keep rats under control, and we can govern them to some extent, but
it seems only we can keep ourselves in check.
Bill Whan

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