into the mystics

Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.

-Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington)
American novelist and dramatist
(1869-1946)

I saw the quote above last evening and it's been poking my brain ever since. It's one of those times that I wish I could have a talk with this person from the past. Pick his brain and let mine stop feeling poked. If Tarkington had said Mystics always hope that science will some day validate them, that I could more easily understand. My sense of the root of his meaning at this stage in pondering the statement is that mystics are advanced beyond science in the comprehension of the meaning of it all. That mystics intuit and simply know, where science tests and proves.

I've known some true mystics in my life: cats all. If science would someday overtake the mystical cat life what could that mean ...... that my favorite cats through the decades would still be alive today? That they still would have died through the years but that I might easily experience their presence? That humans could follow cat gurus to learn how to become more cat like, i.e. perfect, according to the cat? That our first cat president born of a white, domestic short-hair mama cat and a black Persian papa cat would have to produce proof that the litter from which he came was the one mama cat had in the U.S. and not that other one she had while visiting Persia?
Ah well, those are enough crazy questions this early morning.......

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

-Carl Van Vechten