Cat on a Wall

The legal philosopher John Finnis argued that there are seven ‘basic goods’ in human life – goods that are fundamental, self-evidently good and irreducible to other things. There is much that I disagree with in the philosophy of Finnis, but there is one thing I like about this particular theory. The seven basic goods include such serious and weighty matters as Life, Knowledge and Religion, but – and this is what I like about his theory – Play is among them too. Finnis defines play as “performances which have no point beyond the performance itself, enjoyed for its own sake.”

Last night I went to Tibetan Delight to eat pan-fried momos. While I ate, I could hear an altercation in the background between the waiter who looks like Jimmy Neutron and the lady who sits at the cash counter (who I think is his mother).

After the meal, walking through the narrow alley that connects Tibetan Delight to the real world, I spotted a cat on a wall. There was a telephone wire stretched above the wall, and from it hung a pebble on the end of a string. The pebble was swinging like a pendulum, and the cat’s head went back and forth as she followed its motion. When the pebble came to rest, the cat stood up on her hind legs, stretched upwards, and with a light swipe of her paw, set the pebble swinging again.

I watched this performance for sometime, then Jimmy Neutron came out of the restaurant and joined me. Then his mother came out too, and the three of us stood there, silently watching the cat. After five or six swipes, the cat tired of the game, and with that air of supreme unconcern that only cats can muster, it walked away.

Until I saw the cat, I wasn’t in a particularly cheerful mood, because I’d seen two movies that evening, neither of which I understood. Jimmy Neutron didn’t look too cheerful either, perhaps because of the altercation. And his mother is one of those people who hardly ever look cheerful. But as we went our separate ways – Jimmy Neutron and his mother back to the restaurant and I to the bus stop – all three of us had silly grins on our faces.