Freedom is a demanding book, questioning any penchant the reader may have, from sports to environmentalism, from ballet to rock music, and offering no consolation whatsoever, unless we consider the successful careers of the characters in their respective fields of interest a consolation. It’s also a claustrophobic book, ecompassing all aspects of the WASP life in its 600-pages organic whole, and pushing all the rest in a limbo of non-existence (in fact, the only non-wasp characters either die, or speak some Spanish just to annoy a leading character).
Last Sunday, at the end of the ordeal, I was quite depressed, by the dysfunctions of the Western family, by the doomed destiny of the cerulean warbler, by the lost bitterns. I find it difficult to decide whether this depended on me being a (kind of) literate Westerner and a birdwatcher myself (by the way, saw two hoopoes last week, envy me), or on Franzen’s ability to portray the universality of human condition. Anyway, connecting with Jonathan Franzen this time was quite wearing, in the end I felt tired as Mr. Spock after a Vulcanian mind fusion. Maybe my problem is that I have internalized Discomfort Zone too much, so was way too prepared for Freedom and so I succumbed to it. Or maybe it’s because I’ve always considered the American obsession for personal freedom, well, an obsession, caused by well known historical and cultural reasons such as the Puritan escape from old corrupted and persecutory Europe, therefore all this amazing literary discovery that freedom actually can be a problem in the big picture in particular when it’s practiced by irresponsible idiots, well, maybe wasn’t so amazing for me, or at least wasn’t requiring so many pages and troubles.
Anyway, I hope I won’t have to read about selling your parents properties once again in the near future.
But of course Freedom is a great novel, and if I was to judge from the first chapter, I would say it is a candidate to the Great American Novel. Nevertheless I’m happy it’s finished, and as the fatigue fades, the point of the whole novel emerges. The point is the sustainable cat.
As an environmentalist, I’m not a fan of domestic animals. I would prefer all animals to be wild. But as many species actually are domestic, it is my intention to work so that they can have a a life as decent as possible from an ethological point of view, be them farmed animals or pets. Nowadays domestic animals live on highly processed food, need drugs, supplies, logistics, and therefore consume oil and produce Co2. That is to say they are not longer part of the natural ecosystem, but they have a carbon footprint as well as we have, which contributes to the destruction of the natural ecosystem. There are also ethical issues involved, as many products marketed for domestic animals are obtained from (other) farmed animals and also tested on lab animals. Minimizing these probles requires higher costs, for example those of turning intensive farming into organic farming, and can be very complicated, for example feeding pets fresh local food instead of processed food involves leaning which kind of human food is suitable for an animal with a completely different metabolism.
The cat is one of the most common pets in the Western world. It retains a number of lovely wild features, but if you’ve ever met a wild cat in the back-country, you know very well from how it looked like and how it looked at you that a domestic cat has nothing to do with it. Conversely, if you’ve never met a wild cat in the back-country this is an hint of how rare wild cats are, and how hard they are trying to avoid you. Wild cats are still part of the natural ecosystem, living alone in their natural habitat, each cat guarding a vast territory, fighting occasionally, breeding once a year, and feeding on the weakest preys according to Darwin. Stray cats instead live in great number in urban and suburban environments where preys are scarce, therefore they need to rely on human garbage and charity and help, otherwise they starve, they die by infectious diseases, in car accidents, or killed by cat-haters. In turn, the average pet cat lives on processed food, hunts scarce preys for sports, fights often and breeds a lot. In fact, spaying and neutering domestic cats has become mandatory (albeit sad), and keeping them indoors is becoming recommended, in order to reduce overpopulation, diseases, death and cruelty, and also in order to protect the already endangered wildlife. So this is what has become of us. In the end, there is really nothing we can do, apart from doing what we have to do, and trying to protect our favourite species or individual on our appropriately-fenced property, and we’ve better found a trust and name it after a loved one, in order to give ourselves a happy ending, and save our heirs the experience of selling the property. which is more trouble than money as we well know.
And if we don’t keep our cats indoors, Jonathan Franzen will come and kidnap them.
