Student of Life

“I remember reading about a scientist. He had a thing for cats in boxes. What he’d do is take a cat and lock it in a box. And then, just to make things interesting, he’d also put this machine in there that released poison gas. Now, the scientist didn’t actually know when the machine would release the poison and when it wouldn’t. The only way you could tell for sure was to look inside the box. Here’s the science bit: until he opened it up, he figured the cat had to be alive AND dead. See, if either one was possible, then both had to be possible, too. Ever since I read about that cat, I can’t get the story out of my head. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t give a fuck about the plight of small, furry animals. I just don’t understand. How can anything be alive and dead at the same time? … It took me a while, but I think I finally understood why the scientist put the cat in the box. He was trying to tell us something. We’re all alive. We’re all dead. We’re all that cat. But we have to make a choice. We either purr and lick ourselves and wait for the poison to put us down. Or we scream and scratch and claw our way right out of the top of that damn box.”
- Jude Law in Repo Men