{"id":12608,"date":"2013-10-21T09:05:23","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T13:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=12608"},"modified":"2013-10-21T09:05:23","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T13:05:23","slug":"what-the-cat-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=12608","title":{"rendered":"the scholar and his dog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Twelve centuries ago by a long Swiss lake,<br \/>\nPangur B\u00e1n hunted and an Irish monk looked.<br \/>\nThe monk strained for sense from knotty old books;<br \/>\nHis Celtic cat stared at the rustling rocks.<br \/>\nThe cat was sharper and more often struck,<br \/>\nBut both loved the chase, and the monk loved his pet.<br \/>\nTwelve centuries later my dog and I<br \/>\nWalk Cambridge streets lost in separate thought.<br \/>\nHe stops to sniff trails; I check my emails.<br \/>\nSensing a modern mouse has scurried by,<br \/>\nHe jingles his tags and trots on while I<br \/>\nShake off my inbox, walk, and concentrate.<br \/>\nThe monk\u2019s name is lost. The name Pangur B\u00e1n<br \/>\nLives on, but I assume it was only the man<br \/>\nWho saw the analogy of monk and pet<br \/>\nAnd put it in verse that speaks to us still. Yet<br \/>\nCould it be my dog and the long-passed cat<br \/>\nWho knew the truth? We <em>all<\/em> just do what<br \/>\nWe\u2019re made to do, and it\u2019s better to do<br \/>\nIt together. (Pangur B\u00e1n\u2019s mice knew that too.)<\/p>\n<p><em>Cf. the 9th-century Irish poem as translated by Robin Flower (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ling.upenn.edu\/~beatrice\/pangur-ban.html\">The Scholar and His Cat<\/a>&#8220;) and by Seamus Heaney (as &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poetrymagazine\/poem\/177882\">Pangur B\u00e1n&#8221;)<\/a><\/em><em>; and see the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pangur_B%C3%A1n\">Wikipedia entry<\/a> for context.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twelve centuries ago by a long Swiss lake, Pangur B\u00e1n hunted and an Irish monk looked. The monk strained for sense from knotty old books; His Celtic cat stared at the rustling rocks. The cat was sharper and more often struck, But both loved the chase, and the monk loved his pet. Twelve centuries later [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12608"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12656,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12608\/revisions\/12656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}