My cat Henry is a big fellow with a plush gray coat that reminds me of a velvet sofa. When he’s not eating or sleeping or pestering me for more food so that he might increase his formidable girth, he loves to sit on a wide window sill and gaze out into the alien world beyond the glass. In fact, he’s relaxing comfortably at the window in front of me as I write this, his paws stretched out in the manner of a Sphinx. Gold and chestnut leaves wave from the trees; Henry, being color-blind like all his kin, remains oblivious to the charms of autumn. He spots a crow perched on the chimney; that’s more like it. He chatters as if to entice the hefty bird within reach. I don’t think he suspects that a crow could probably take him in a one-on-one match.

Henry is twelve now; if he were one of us he’d be subscribing to Modern Maturity and considering the enticements of retirement in Florida. I worried about his welfare when we moved recently from our old place, where he enjoyed regular access to my balcony. There, crouched amid the planters, he’d lie in wait for any feathered intruders naive enough to attempt a landing on the balcony floor. Henry's birdwatching proved to be a harmless enough diversion, the feline equivalent of a video game. In all those years he caught just two birds that I’m aware of. One of them he dragged into my bedroom at seven-thirty in the morning, still flapping, as a tribute to my leadership, omniscience, or ability to open a can of Whiskas Turkey with Giblets. (I persuaded Henry to drop the terrified bird, then spent five minutes chasing it around the room so I could fling a towel over the critter and launch it back into the sky from my balcony.) The other fowl Henry caught wasn’t as fortunate; I returned from work one day to find a small mound of feathers next to my hammock.

But Henry is strictly an indoor cat now, and the world is once again safe for all manner of birdlife. I’m happy to see that Henry has adjusted to his new precincts, that he finds them congenial, and that he plans to spend his golden years yawning and stretching on our upstairs window sills. I’m happy that he seems to be happy.

Consider the happiness of a cat. Unlike his canine cousins, a cat probably isn’t capable of boisterous exultation (although it’s hard for those of us who aren’t cats to know for sure). From all appearances the happiness of a cat is better described as felicity, a word that for me has always carried connotations of purring feline contentment. One imagines George Washington, surveying his plantation from atop a horse at the end of the growing season, experiencing true feline felicity. He wouldn’t have slapped his knee and hooted like Abe Lincoln telling one of his patented off-color frontier tales; he’d probably have surveyed the landscape, found its ripe abundance pleasing to his soul, then narrowed his eyes and purred contentedly.

A cat enjoys the quiet self-esteem of one who is comfortable in his skin, who requires no applause or salary raises to hold his tail high. A cat’s self-regard seems to be natural and unshakable despite his total ignorance of Western civilization. No cat has ever read the Iliad or stopped to admire a fine building with Ionic columns. No cat could tell you who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, let alone what year the battle took place. A cat has never seen the Mona Lisa or heard of Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, cats in general don’t even know what country they inhabit, or that all of us are residents of a blue-green planet that English-speaking people call Earth. They can’t even tell English-speaking people from Arabic-speaking people. Their ignorance encompasses nearly everything in the universe except what it takes to be a successful cat. On that score nearly all of them are experts, and they require no schooling to attain their proficiency.

I’m beginning to envy the life of a cat. To be able to reap sweet pleasure from a sunny window sill seems more and more to me like the essence of contentment. My cat Henry knows nothing of terrorism, nothing of human fanaticism or megalomania. He hasn’t heard about the attack on the World Trade Center or anthrax spreading its sickening poison through the conduits of our lives. He isn’t looking into the purchase of gas masks or supplies of bottled water.

I could live with that kind of ignorance. Henry’s world is that of a pampered child, restrained in his freedom but serenely sheltered from the horrors of the larger world outside the window. If he feels thwarted in his ambition to prowl that world by night, to stalk the wild mouse and bask in a garden by moonlight, he doesn’t let it show. He knows sunlight and warmth, the certainty of food in his bowl, the expectation of a clean litter box, the comfort of friendly strokes and companionship. In short, unlike most of us these days, he knows true felicity.