The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences. This is why the Golden Rule, a version of which is appears in all major spiritual and ethical traditions, may be the most narcissistic of our moral codes, with its assumption that others want done unto them the same things we ourselves want. One measure of love — perhaps the greatest measure — may be the understanding that another's needs, as incomprehensible as they may appear to us and as orthogonal to our own, are a fundamental part of who they are; that to love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.
In 1963, two years before she composed her iconic ode to friendship, the prolific children's book author, theologian, and novelist Sandol Stoddard (December 16, 1927–January 4, 2018) took up this fundamental challenge of connection in her playful and poignant book My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat (public library).
The story, illustrated with great vivacity and typographic virtuosity by artist, dancer, choreographer, and theater director Remy Charlip (January 10, 1929–August 14, 2012), begins with a boy declaring ownership of his cat, in that classic "MINE!" way that children have of feeling out the boundary between where they end and the rest of the world begins — a boundary we spend our lives trying to locate as ever-changing selves moving through an ever-changing world, trying to discern the contours of belonging.
"Come up on my lap and have a little nap," the boy commands the cat, who looks in no mood for a nap on a lap. Page after page, we see the boy treat the cat as his plaything — dressing the cat in a sweater, putting the cat in a stroller, tucking the cat into a crib — until the forbearing cat finally has it and claws out the sweater, leaps from under the blanket, breaks out of the bed, breaking the bed.
With the fury of a dispossessed tyrant that so readily comes to children (and to the petulant child nested in every maturity), the boy roars an indignant declaration of ownership at the cat, who gently sings back the fundamental dignity of personhood.
In consonance with Alan Watt's prescription for how to become who you truly are, in which he insisted that "Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others," the cat's outpouring of self-possession undams the boy's own.
In the end, the boy discovers what we all must eventually, if we are to grow into the full bigness of the heart: that in every relationship of trust and tenderness, each is the guardian of the other's particularity; that to love someone not for the comfort or compliance they can give you but for exactly who they are, the special and particular person, is the greatest, the only kind of love; that it is impossible to achieve this without first learning to love yourself for exactly who you are, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires — for, as e.e. cummings so memorably wrote, "to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight." Or any cat can fight. The story ends with the companionable quietude of boy and cat coming to rest in their parallel particularities — that supreme measure of a healthy bond.
And, as another excellent writer wrote in another cat-story of what it means to be human: "You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that's okay, love is better."
The Coziest Place on the Moon
An illustrated fable about how to live with loneliness and what it means to love
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