NOW that it seems the world has been rebooked from the Apocalypse Express on to the Apocalypse Replacement Bus Service, there is a moment in which to write about things of lasting value: cats and poetry.

The two come together in a book that I found by chance in a provincial Waterstones on the display table of books for people who don’t like reading — but this was by Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work is a gust of pure delight for anyone who really breathes by reading. Her father, indeed, makes a cameo appearance in one of Francis Spufford’s novels.

Her Book of Cats is a slight, posthumous, collection, and it is playful, closely observed, and almost as unsentimental as its subjects. About half the pages are silly drawings made for her children; but interleaved with them are poems as spare as Chinese landscape paintings. She was the child of anthropologists, raised, in her own phrase, “as irreligious as a jackrabbit”, and she approached questions that seem religious from a completely naturalistic perspective, which in some ways heightened the awe and mystery which piety can be used to cloak. Take, for instance, the death of a cat.

His eyes did not see outward any more,
the gold gone dull behind the crystal spheres.
He lifted up his head and cried out twice,
loudly, to whom? and stretched himself, and died,
the small soul going forth with terrible grandeur.

Talk of a soul and its grandeur may not seem naturalistic, but it is. What it is not is materialistic. But it is language that comes naturally when we see these things happen, and, if it is imprecise, better measurements will not make it any more precise.

Whether this is religious, I don’t know: Le Guin’s perspective was Daoist, and Daoism is hardly a religion at all by Western or Christian standards. There is no eternity for her; there is only change. The world, “all that is not cat . . . will rejoin without a seam when he is dead”, she writes in another poem.

Perhaps because of her childhood among anthropologists, Le Guin was extremely sensitive to the contingencies of cultural formation. Much of her science fiction was about the exploration of different cultures, and the technology was there only to provide a backdrop against which the story could play out. There had to be some way for all those strange planets to have been settled, so that their various cultures could form; but the details were wholly unimportant.

Certainly, she saw nothing unusually admirable in contemporary American culture: “We human beings have made a world reduced to ourselves and our artefacts”, she wrote, “but we weren’t made for it and have to teach our children to live in it. . . Our children must learn poverty and exile, to live in concrete among endless human beings, seeing animals only as a bird high in the air, a beast on a leash or in a cage, a film image.”

The world that she shows us is one without cuteness. Walt Disney would have been torn to death by wild beasts if he had ever ventured in. There are no petting zoos in paradise. In fact, all beasts are wild there, and that is what makes them precious. It would be no great distinction for Aslan there not to be a tame lion.

Le Guin writes in the persona of a cat: “The female human was petting my wonderfully thick, dense, silky warm fur and I was purring away . . . when like lightning the desire to bite came upon me and like lightning I bit. . . I hissed back at her, leapt off the bed, and departed with dignity, while she was still hissing and bleeding. I felt good about the whole thing.”

Although there are humans like that, we think that there is something wrong with them: that they are not acting or feeling in accordance with human nature; but inhuman nature is almost entirely catlike. “People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon could approach in cruelty some of the commoner diseases?” as Orwell wrote, who had spent time both on the front line of the Spanish Civil War and in a hospital for the indigent in Paris.

To the extent that God can be held responsible for his creation, he is obviously on the side of the cats, and perhaps the true originality of Christianity is the suggestion that he is on the side of the humans, too.