Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea

Certain friends were rather sceptical of me reading this book. I myself am not a serious tea-drinker. My beverage of choice is water. I do not drink coffee and can’t stand alcohol either. At their most exotic my tastes generally reach only as far as hot chocolate and apple juice. But when I was in Moscow at the beginning of this year, I did spend a little time drinking tea. I even, with what proved atrocious timing, bought an expensive tea set from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg the day before Russia invaded Ukraine.

I do not like the taste of tea that much, though it does provide a little variety. What I do like, however, is the ritual surrounding it. Kettle on, teabag in, steep, remove the bag, wait for the temperature to become bearable, and then finally drink. To this list, we might add various intermediary stages – hot water to the teapot, teapot to teacup, the ubiquitous milk and sugar. There is something (comforting? Or homely?) about drinking tea that seems to suggest that life is good. It is a stabilising act. You can’t successfully make tea while running or in a rush. You have to be calm and have a little time on your hands. It both requires stability and order, and plays its part in creating them. I look forward to the next time I will feel at ease enough to want to brew myself a cuppa.

By comparison with me and my little ritual of kettle-to-cup, the ceremonies described in Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea are elaborate pageantry. But I did not read The Book of Tea to learn about tea, so I was not upset to find that the book, which is really a long essay broken into short chapters, does not have that much to do with tea. Instead, it is about the meaning of tea drinking and its connection with Eastern philosophy. Written in English, its goal is at least partly to illumine us westerners’ ideas of Japan and its culture, and it does this by connecting the culture to the sources and ideas that inspire it. In my case, specifically, I was inspired to read Okakura’s book by its connection with Heidegger, who was given a copy in 1919. Some philosophers, such as Tomonobu Imamichi, say he was inspired to create one of his key concepts, that of “being-in-the-worldness” after he read it.  

My fancy tea set, now stranded in a dacha outside of Saint Petersburg with the rest of my things.

The Book of Tea is broken up into seven sections, each of which deals with a different aspect of tea and culture. Some of these were more relevant to my search than others. Things like section II, “The Schools of Tea”, a look at the curious history of tea drinking in East Asia, in particular in how its preparation differed in different periods and places, and why that was so; section IV, on the tea room itself, and the architectural principles lying behind it; and finally, section VI, about flowers and what our treatment of them says about us and our cultures, were all interesting but not necessarily as philosophically dense as the third section, dealing with “Taoism and Zennism”.

Less philosophically dense, less explicit on that topic, but not devoid of philosophy either. If “Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence”, then every attention given to that beauty within these pages has a part to play. Okakura describes his little philosophy as “essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.” The ritual of tea drinking is not a mere mechanical process for him, but rather seems to contain an image of life that we would do well to absorb into ourselves –

“It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.”

It is a ritual that elevates simplicity above tacky grandeur, that beatifies it. The austerely adorned tea rooms of Japan are not empty because of poverty, but because of love and respect for what they do contain. A single painting or flower, together with the tea itself, can do more to summon an atmosphere and create a mood, than an entire forest of bric-a-brac can. Okakura notes in connection with this the obvious but memorable fact that “one cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time.” In short, unity of effect, or that oft-repeated word, harmony, is more important than merely proving one’s power and riches, intentionally or not, by a clutter of shiny objects.

The thing that The Book of Tea does best, I think, is serve as a bridge between cultures. Okakura’s English is every bit as harmonic and beautiful as the tea scenes he describes, and he brings many new thinkers and characters into our world as we read. No matter how philosophical he is waxing, he is always willing to use traditional stories and anecdotes to make his points. My favourite of these concerns Rikiu, a legendary tea-master, and his son. One day he asked his son to clean to the way to the tea house. Shoan, the son, swept the path and tidied everything up. Despite this, Rikiu said he had not done the job properly, so Shoan returned to his task. Eventually, he said to his father that he could clean no further, that the whole thing was spotless. But his father shook his head and walked to the nearest tree and shook it, scattering over the garden path its red and gold leaves. Cleanliness is one thing, but the master’s goals were always beyond it, in the creation of a full and perfect impression.

“Teaism” grew out of Taoism and Zennism, two of the major Eastern traditions. Taoism has been called the “art of being in the world” (Heidegger no doubt spat out his own tea at this point) by some Chinese historians, Okakura informs us. Taoism’s key message in Okakura’s reading lies in adaptability, “a constant readjustment to our surroundings”. A readiness for change led practically to an emphasis on hesitancy and care when going about our lives, a sort of reverence arising through respect for the malleability of life and things. The second part of the puzzle is Zennism, whose key contribution is “its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual.” In reorientating ourselves towards the everyday, and making us treat it seriously, we have the philosophical foundations necessary to drink tea as a Tea-ist. “Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.”

I myself have not had a proper Eastern philosophy “phase”. At school, the furthest I got was downloading the Tao-Te-Ching on my Kindle, and then never getting around to reading it. At various times I have tried meditating but never got very far with that either. As for a literary approach, both my Schopenhauer and my Siddhartha (the Hesse novel, which apparently isn’t a fantastic representation of Buddhism, anyway) are stuck in Russia for the time being, alongside the tea set I mentioned earlier. As I have not had such a phase, I was very much treading new ground reading The Book of Tea, and have no way of telling how well it represents its themes.

Yet who needs all that to know that this is a book presenting some sensible ideas? Especially today, when much of the world’s problems seem connected to our having too much stuff and thinking we need more, The Book of Tea emphasises the way that reality can be transfigured if we only alter our attitude towards it a little bit. “When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.”

In all this, Teaism fits nicely into the world of Wendell Berry, and indeed of other environmental thinkers with their emphasis on the local and the small instead of the boundless and consumptive. In a single room, with a single cup, there can be more fodder for the imagination than in the greatest houses of the world. Whether or not we choose to make this the guiding principle of our lives, it still has much to offer us. Because anything that teaches us reverence and to find beauty in the everyday can never teach us that truth often enough.

Orlando Figes – The Europeans

I cannot think of any book or other piece of culture, written or produced in the nineteenth century, which is not enriched and enlivened by reading Orlando Figes’ The Europeans. It is magisterial, dazzling, and breath-taking. With every page another brick is added to that great edifice that is nineteenth-century European culture, we learn some new name or other detail, another colour is added to the painting which portrays in a vividness that leaves even the greatest realist author red-faced and shaking with jealousy, the world as it once was, the hopes it had.

This is a work of history, with three individuals at its centre. Pauline Viardot was a great opera singer; her husband Louis was a great scholar, activist, and collector; and her lover and friend Ivan Turgenev was not just a writer but the foremost figure promoting the cultural exchange between European nations in the arts. Through their stories and the history that surrounds them, Figes details pretty much everything worth knowing about the (high) cultural development of the 19th century. We learn of changes in the publishing business, the rivalries of opera houses, the development of gambling in spa towns, the growth of tourism and the creation of guidebooks, and much more besides.

Structurally, The Europeans is a halfway house between the creative and brilliant biographies of Richard Holmes and the barrage of facts we might associate with history proper. Whereas Holmes tends to prioritise people over facts – I rarely feel I learn that much when I read him – Figes goes into much more detail on the latter, so that his recreations are much less vivid, even as their world is much more so. Each chapter is for the most part thematically linked, whether it be the topic of leisure and spas, or the English and their formality, so that even though at times Figes can seem to be adding a random aside on this or that topic, nevertheless it all fits into a wider picture.

And this picture is culture: “Europe as a space of cultural transfers, translations and exchanges crossing national boundaries, out of which a “European culture” – an international synthesis of artistic forms, ideas, and styles – would come into existence and distinguish Europe from the broader world.” Kenneth Clark once wrote that all the world’s great artistic leaps have come in periods of increased internationalism, and Figes’ story takes us into one of those. Beyond the Viardots and Turgenev, the real hero of the narrative has wheels and races along a metal road – it is none other than the steam train.

In Figes’ view, the railway can be held partly responsible for almost all the great changes of Europe’s nineteenth century. How did the Revolutions of 1848 spread like wildfire? Because people were able to travel quickly, bringing news from one place to the next. International railways turned towns like Baden-Baden into equally international cosmopolitan centres. They allowed for musical and theatrical groups to cover a much wider geographical range than they had previously, thus leaving them better positioned to negotiate contracts. Pauline sang in all the major European capitals during her career, for example, and even spent a season across the Atlantic in the United States. They also shaped Europe’s touristic map, as package tours first developed in this period, and bulk-buying tickets on the railway was one way that people like Thomas Cook were able to turn a profit. Figes even goes so far as to suggest that the short story as a form developed out of the railways, as people wanted something shorter to ride on their journeys. This seems a stretch too far, but it’s hard to overstate the railways’ importance.

Much as with Holmes’ The Age of Wonder, which I wrote about recently, we learn about the little inventions that brought major changes – the railway being unable to cover every manifestation of progress in this century. We learn that painters were able to paint en plein air for the first time because of the invention of tin tubes for their oil paints – previously they were stored in animal skins and would dry out for anything longer than the most preliminary of sketches. We also learn about photography and the way that it impacted literature and the other arts, or the advent of mass printing music.

However, with that all said, the main inventions were not technological, but capitalistic. Music became popular not only because of the piano but also because of sheet music. A situation developed where popular sheet music motivated people to go to watch the original performances, which in turn motivated more people to buy the scores. The Europeans is full of such symbiotic relationships. At the same time, we are introduced to countless crafty businessmen who develop in embryonic form many of the things we might take for granted about marketing and advertising today. In a world without international copyright or performance rights, authors and composers had to take ingenious steps to secure themselves an income.

One of the major underlying narrative strands concerns the shifting fortunes of cosmopolitanism in the century. We can see this through the example of the German-born Jewish composer Meyerbeer, who was naturalised as a Frenchman and at ease in both countries. Later on, there came Wagner, whose antisemitism is the stuff of legend and whose music and self-presentation were all designed to make himself as German as possible. “I am the most German of all of them, I am the German spirit”, he wrote in his diary. Next to Wagner, another nationalist figure was Dostoevsky, whom we meet acting like an ass at the gambling salons, but even the great cosmopolitan Turgenev himself temporarily falls into patriotic fervour at the time of the Crimean War. We would do well to remember that war is not a thing that lends itself to rational feelings, and Turgenev later regretted his emotions.

If once the railway had allowed internationalism to flourish, and places like Baden-Baden to develop into highly cosmopolitan centres, it also played its part in destroying that same world. Part of the reason the Prussians under Bismarck were able to wage war so effectively was due to their masterful logistic exploitation of train tracks to shift personnel and materiel towards the front. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which left Germany unified, also marked the end of the world of the spas. The French now shunned places like Baden-Baden, which were subsumed into the new Reich. The Viardots and Turgenev, who had lived there happily, were forced to sell up and leave in the hostile environment that formed after Germany’s victory.

Still, as I said, these things ebb and flow. The Berne Convention of 1886 established international copyright; the socialists conducted their Internationals; the International Red Cross and women’s liberation movements all grew after this period – internationalism returned, just as nationalism would a little later.

The lives at the centre of this story are well chosen, not just because they were artistic and connected to many of the cultural developments that Figes discusses in The Europeans. Rather, they are well-chosen because they were, in the truest sense, heroes of a cosmopolitan, European culture. Turgenev’s library had books in nine languages. His love letters to Pauline, and hers to him, switched language to German whenever anything saucy needed to be written, because Louis could not understand that language. They lived in what is now Germany, the United Kingdom, and France; and Turgenev obviously grew up in Russia. Through their travels, they saw all of Europe and a great many Europeans. All the great musical names, all the artists, all the writers, knew them and visited them. Turgenev and Pauline in particular were vital in establishing Russian culture in Germany and France, and those cultures in Russia.

But all this does leave us asking what it actually means, this Europeanness? Figes follows a show-don’t-tell approach, giving us a view of what it looks like more than a prescriptive definition. He notes that for Turgenev, “the “Europe” he inhabited was an international civilization, a Republic of Letters based on the Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and democracy”. This chimes with Paul Valéry’s view that European culture is a “shared inheritance” based on “a desire for understanding and exchange”, or Stefan Zweig’s that it is “a supranational realm of humanism”. In short, it is a world of cultural interchange and growth in shared values, that sees what binds us more than what drives us apart. There is no space in this world for a God-bearing people, as Dostoevsky saw his own to be. There is only space for people themselves. 

On my census form last year, I wrote that I was European, as well as British and Scottish and English. I meant it seriously. I have been to eleven countries inside Europe, which I admit is a poor total, but I have every intention of visiting them all. I speak, badly, more languages than just my own. (We learn in The Europeans about the shocking cultural isolation of even the most educated Brits. Plus ca change). But more importantly, I feel a bond with these people, all of them, who are trapped on the same stretch of rock as myself. The nitty-gritty of it, the religious and geographical and political questions, are honestly unimportant. Like Turgenev, Europeanness is a set of values which I can feel, even if I am merely projecting my own views. It is a culture where I feel at home, far more than I do even in American literature, to which I am no stranger.

If I go in search of ideals, it is a European one that I find closest to my heart, not a British one. Cosmopolitan, welcoming, intelligent, dutiful, open. These are important things to me, more so than the stuffiness and seriousness and coolness that I associate with my own country. Just as it is important to me to travel, to wander this continent, to learn its languages, to meet its people. The European project is an individual project just as much as it is a political one (about which one can disagree). I must make myself European, and one thing I hope this blog will become is a statement of those painful efforts. I am grateful for Orlando Figes’ work not because it shows a world that is better than our own – because it certainly wasn’t, as his saddening section on women composers easily demonstrates – but because it provides the hope and strength needed to act in the service of the ideals its heroes believed in. Reading it, we can all become Europeans.

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

I remember first seeing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending at school. Twenty copies used to sit in one of the classrooms I had English lessons in – I imagined it was on some A-level syllabus as a recent masterpiece, which predisposed me to dislike it. (It was some time before I realised authors could write alright without first being dead.) It did win the Man Booker Prize in 2011, which is practically yesterday, after all. And certainly, if we want to be uncharitable, this is a book that can be knocked down by pigeonholing it as one of those books that seems written to secure a place on a syllabus. We have a textbook unreliable narrator, a dualistic structure to consider, a limited number of characters, things to talk about, literary references, school days, and a length which means even the laziest schoolkid might actually read it, or at least be able to sprint through it on the night before the exam. With that said, readers expecting me to rehash my criticism of Schlink’s dreadful The Reader will be disappointed for the simple reason that The Sense of an Ending is actually pretty good.

There are two stories here, one for each of the novel’s two parts. Tony Webster tells his life story in the first part, or at least the life story he thought was his own. He goes to school and has three friends including the intelligent Adrian Finn, then they head their separate ways and begin drifting apart. At university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica, stays once at her house for the weekend and later introduces her to his friends, before eventually breaking up with her. He later discovers that Adrian, who ended up at Cambridge, is now going out with Veronica. He writes them a postcard and a letter, the latter of which he barely remembers, and then sometime later learns that Adrian has committed suicide. In his note, Adrian explains his decision with reference to philosophy and the importance of free will. This existential flourish seems in line with the Adrian that Tony knew at school, so he agrees with his friends that the death is a shame, but not out of character. Tony then finishes university, gets married and has a child, gets divorced and retires, and that’s really as much as we get. “And that’s a life, isn’t it?” – one told from beginning to apparent end. There are some disappointments, some pleasures, but really it is a slightly cautious, empty thing.

The second part begins when the older Tony receives information that he has been given a little money and two documents through the will of a certain Mrs Ford – Veronica’s mother. We are just as confused as he is. The first of these documents is a short and ambiguous letter from Mrs Ford, while the second is a diary – Adrian’s diary – which has been taken by Veronica and which Tony then spends much of the second story trying to get back. Here is our mystery. Why does Mrs Ford have the diary, why is she giving him the money? Tony’s rather confused attempts at working all this out and what he discovers along the way is what The Sense of an Ending is, in essence, about. It completely changes our reading of the first part because it turns out not that Tony has been coy about the truth, but rather that he has simply forgotten it and let it fade. The new information of the second part is a rude awakening that forces him to look back at his life again and interrogate how it all really took place.

Narrative

At its heart, The Sense of an Ending is about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the lies that Tony has told himself his whole life, and the “truth” he eventually discovers. Adrian, ever precocious, quotes the Frenchman Patrick Lagrange: ‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”’ The first part of the novel is one certainty, the certainty that Tony has about his life based on the memories he has retained of it. The second part concerns the new “history” that writes itself when he finds documentation that does not sit easily next to his original view of things.  

Tony is well aware of how this all works. The novel is full of philosophical asides that work well to hammer in its themes. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” Tony does meet Veronica again, but he never sees more than a page of the diary – for she has burned it. Her excuse, “People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries”, is not unreasonable. To read a diary in which you figure is guaranteed to knock you off balance, because it reveals the unadulterated vision of history that belongs to someone else, and thus necessarily contradicts your own.

Worse still is when Tony receives a copy of the letter that he had sent to Adrian and Veronica after hearing that they were going out. In the novel’s first part the letter is passed over briefly as if it were of no importance at all, but we later see that this is an evasion – by Tony or by his subconscious, we cannot say. The letter is brutal, nasty, and exceptionally spiteful. And it is the last thing he ever sent to his friend before he died. Tony cannot deny that it is his letter, but he does not seem able to accept it fully either:

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

Taken as a whole, The Sense of an Ending is full of things that seem to separate us from anything close to the truth, with language itself being a particular target. Early on, for example, Tony notes how the word “going out” has changed in its definition over the course of his own lifetime, making us aware of how at a basic level the words we read and understand now may not correspond to what Tony is actually trying to convey. At another point, after talking to a solicitor, Tony notes how his own linguistic independence seems to be lost in conversation with them – “Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?” Finally, there is the newspaper report of Adrian’s death, the ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’, which is so cliché at this point that the words are essentially empty.

It’s not for nothing, then, that Veronica seems to spend the entire book telling Tony that he just doesn’t “get it”. If our memories are faulty, just as faulty will likely be our attempts to fix them. Early on in the first part, while discussing history writing, Adrian says that the only way to understand a given work of history is to understand its author’s biases. But we cannot, because they are too complicated, and often too deeply hidden. One comes away from The Sense of an Ending rather battered, clutching the solution to the mystery that Tony does eventually reach, but with a feeling that so much has been lost in the search for it that we might have been better off just staying in the novel’s staid and stable first part.

All in all, I did enjoy The Sense of an Ending. I had read some rather hostile reviews that had said it was a work of philosophy with nary a novel in sight. This criticism falls flat to me. Of course, the novel does indulge in a lot of introspection, but it does not feel out of place. As far as I am aware, older people do tend to reflect on their lives – Tony is not unique in this. Its main fault is that Tony does tend to repeat himself and the same ideas in only slightly varying phrases, which is tedious by the end. The plot here is sufficiently meaty, the characters sufficiently real, to satisfy me, even if it does suffer from that problem that most introspective works do, namely that it’s a little claustrophobic and airless. There are not enough characters, nor enough vibrancy, at times.

To end with I want to note that it’s interesting how we have come to this sort of novel. The great modernist writers loved their interiority and stream-of-consciousness. Now, with that vein fully excavated, we move from the experience of the present into the experience of the past and the failures of memory and interpretation – as we did in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Sebald’s The Emigrants. This is a mere musing on my part, not an exact science – after all, Ford’s The Good Soldier came out in 1915. However, perhaps what I am trying to suggest is that there is no sense that Tony is deliberately confounding us here. Instead, we simply have a world that is hard to make sense of because we are all, all of us, reliant upon memories that do not match up with those of others or to the world itself. In this sense at least it is a somewhat forgiving novel, and one that possesses a message valid for our own lives.

Anyway, it’s an interesting little book and easily readable in a single sitting.