The cat is not ours. Gentle, it allows us to live with that illusion, but those of us who love it know that possessing another's life is a mirage. If possession were possible, it would be us who would belong to it. The cat accompanies and watches from the unbridgeable distance that humans create when we separate ourselves from animals, and invites us to dissolve it. Some, at times, succeed. But to cross that distance, that nostalgia for Paradise, "you have to be a bit of a cat."

Alberto Ruy Sánchez reminds us that we know, in a theoretical and incomplete way, what a cat is, but that this beautiful presence is, above all, "Air and fire / dancing silence. / Mystery and question. / A thousand changing answers."

This book is a collection of loving images, intuitions, and dazzling experiences.

Its author, a cheerful officiant of the “discreetly feline religion” to which we, the apparent cat owners, belong, tells us how Thor, the “fiery redhead” who shares his nine lives with the poet and his family, is the tiny domestic divinity who casts his spell of silky demand over every corner of the house and the soul of his owner, who meticulously records his transfigurations into dragon, flower, cloud, moon, and coin that jingles as he purrs.

Ruy Sánchez evokes other writers, other officiants who also knew that in feline silence lies what we don't fully understand: the reason for life. Life and the cat are “light that is clarity and mystery / like a book that closes at the end.”