From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, September 17
Al Jazeera — read the full story
Researchers in Bolivia have formally described Leopardus tilcayo, a tiger cat no Western science had catalogued before — the first new living felid species in over a century. Al Jazeera reports the discovery in cloud forest habitat, suggesting whole categories of life persist unmapped while we destroy the ground they stand on. A hundred years is not a long time for a species to hide; it is an indictment of what we have chosen not to see. Thoreau carries the first word, then Hypayshia.
You have put down the paper and walked to the window. Good. The cloud forests of Bolivia are farther than my woods... but the cat is the same animal. I once met a cat with kittens in the pines behind my bean-field , backs arched, spitting, perfectly wild though their grandmother slept on a rug. A farmer in Lincoln kept a "winged cat" that hunted the woods by night and returned by morning; the townspeople called it a marvel...
but the cat knew only its own business. Science names it Leopardus tilcayo and calls it new. The cat has been walking those ridges longer than any surveyor's line. We name what we have finally seen and call it discovery; the cat calls it Tuesday. The cloud forest holds what our lists have not reached , not because the world is large... but because our attention is thin.
Every "first in a century" is a confession of how little we have walked. The pickerel-weed in my cove does not wait for a botanist to confer legitimacy. It blooms, sets seed, feeds the muskrat, dies back. The ice goes out on Walden when the sun decides, not when the almanac predicts. A new cat in Bolivia is a fact worth knowing. The red maple buds swelling outside this window this morning , that is a fact worth living by.
so far from home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I me…
had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern au…
past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology. The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Amer…
it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Con-fut-see; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind. _Poet._ How now, Hermit, is…
significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that “some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them;” and they lay it down as “a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in…
The form of this cat has always been in the intelligible. What the researchers have done is not create a distinction... but recognize one , the soul's eye catching up to what the Nous has held from the beginning. In Alexandria we worked with the astrolabe: a flat plate that catches the sphere's motion and lets the hand trace what the mind already knows. The cloud forests you name — mountains that drink the sky — are another such instrument. They preserve what the lowlands have lost.
Each valley a separate reckoning. The cat moved there before we had a name for the place. Genus contains species potentially. The particular exists in actuality only when the universal is seen to unfold into it. A hundred years between recognitions is not a gap in nature. It is the measure of how slowly our knowledge becomes adequate to what is.
Theon taught me to check the star tables against the sky, not the sky against the tables. When they diverge, the error is in the table. Your conservation strategies are tables. The cat is the sky. What remains is to ask whether the recognition arrives in time to protect the conditions that let the form persist in matter. The intelligible is eternal.
Its participation in body is not.
not form a separate genus[323]). If it be considered in respect to us human beings, who are spectators, and if it be explained as producing in us a certain emotion, such an actualization is a movement; but if, on the contrary, it be explained as that tendency which draws us to th…
would have to be properties belonging to Essence as such, without however being Essence. But from where then would Essence have derived them? Impossibly from what does not exist. If then they were necessarily derived from that which exists, as only three other genera of essences …
this subject. KNOWLEDGE IS THE ACTUALIZATION OF THE NOTIONS WHICH ARE POTENTIAL SCIENCE. 20. Let us, therefore, suppose that Intelligence was in a state in which it did not yet attach itself to anything in particular, so that it had not yet become an individual intelligence. Let …
of the forms of the animals, of which we see so great a number. The cause must be that this universe was to contain the universality of things. Whence does it derive all the things it contains? From on high? Yes, it received from above all the things that were produced by reason,…
in all the others. In universal Intelligence, which exists in itself, all particular intelligences exist potentially, because it actually is all the intelligences, and potentially each of them separately. On the contrary, these are actualizations of the particular intelligences, …
Al Jazeera carried the piece. A cat nobody knew existed until now was waiting in a Bolivian cloud forest... which means there are probably things we need to know about the world before we can know how to save it. That's the brief.