" The big cat cages also stank in the heat. This was before zoos built natural habitats with boulders and waterfalls, and the cages back then were painfully small, the animals miserable. The Bengal tiger had flies creeping all over its eyelids, and he didn’t even blink. There was a kid throwing peanuts at him, and Lecia somehow menaced the boy into stopping. When I grew up and discovered the German poet Rilke, it was this zoo’s sorry-looking cats that I thought back to. As a young poet, Rilke had been sent by the sculptor Rodin to study zoo animals, and he captured in a few lines the same frustrated power that I sensed that day in the dull-coated panther: It seems there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. "

― Mary Karr , The Liars' Club