Winter VI. Tea + Consonance and dissonance, again

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter V. Self regained

One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers, out-of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my deep, soft-elbowed chair, await the tea-tray. Perhaps it is while drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure. In days gone by, I could but gulp down the refreshment hurried, often harassed, by the thought of the work I had before me; often I was quite insensible of the aroma, the flavour, of what I drank. Now, how delicious is the soft yet penetrating odour which floats into my study, with the appearance of the teapot! What solace in the first cup, what deliberate sipping of that which follows! What a glow does it bring after a walk in chilly rain! The while, I look around at my books and pictures, tasting the happiness of their tranquil possession. I cast an eye towards my pipe; perhaps I prepare it, with seeming thoughtfulness, for the reception of tobacco...

In nothing is the English genius for domesticity more notably declared than in the institution of this festival -- almost one may call it so -- of afternoon tea. Beneath simple roofs, the hour of tea has something in it of sacred; for it marks the end of domestic work and worry, and beginning of restful, sociable evening. The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose... it is -- again in the true sense -- the homeliest meal of the day. Is it believable that the Chinese, in who knows how many centuries, have derived from tea a millionth part of the pleasure or the good which it has brought to England in the past one hundred years?

Alpha.

That last sentence got me thinking. It seems that “afternoon tea” in the sense Gissing uses it, only dates from the 1840s, less than a century before. And tea was introduced to the English court in the 1660s, about 240 years before. It’s hard to imagine the English without tea. His claim that they have derived more enjoyment from tea than have the Chinese, or Japanese, suggests a veritable festival of hyperbole. I am also reminded of a favorite passage from Proust, “What fun it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea”. This is one of the sections of this book I would want to read more frequently, maybe even daily, to remind me to pay attention -- to celebrate -- the moment and my meals. The traditional Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony has this some function, of focusing the mind on the moment and heightening the senses. The truth is that most days I just have iced tea, and don’t pay much attention even to that.

Consonance and dissonance, again.

...What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort. In the still life with a lemon, for example, this essence cannot merely be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and of the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them and engender a force, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both tension and the balance of the configuration -- this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form.

-Renee Michel in Hedgehog

Previously, when reading this passage, I focused on the mysterious consonance of art and objects Muriel Barbery is drawing our attention to here. Combining our instinctual appreciation of art with what we can guess of the phenomenological and Quantum reality that underlies what we apprehend (we can leave String theory to the apprehension of music, though it also applies here) leaves us to wonder at the inner workings of beauty and to marvel how much more complex and mysterious the everyday world really is. But this time, reading Hedgehog, I was struck by the first meeting of all the central characters: Renee and Manuela, Paloma, and finally Kakuro. This meeting doesn’t take place until page 267 (with only 58 pages left in the book). By now we know all these characters and how well they fit together -- how well they belong together. In a word, how consonant their personalities are.

What Barbery has been saying about art applies even more to people. Kakuro recognizes in both Renee and Paloma congruent spirits. The three of them instantly fit together because of all they share, including the commonality of how they differ from all the others. We’ve all had this experience many times, of suddenly, after not having anything at all in common with those around us, coming into contact -- communion -- with someone we can actually talk to with some hope of being understood.

How this works is as much a mystery as a Dutch still life. Suddenly, after becoming used to avoiding people or limiting contact or straining to find some common ground, we run into a person we can’t stop talking to, and look forward to engaging again. It can be a shock to the system.

And it isn’t always quite that simple. The woman who most shaped my character, who I best meshed with, was not an immediate fit. She was someone I had to grow into -- too slowly, as it turned out. Yet even then, there was a shared intelligence and way of seeing the world that first drew us together, despite the discrepancies in our personalities. Interpersonal confrontations like this mirror the “shock of the new” in art. And this is also where dissonance comes in, just as I argued that it does in art (Spring XXI. Consonance) in both painting and especially in music. Complete consonance would be bland and insipid when it comes to new people. It’s the level of dissonance that spikes our interest and challenges us to grow.

So, alluding once again to synesthesia and the ability of some people to “see” things differently, could there be people who perceive personalities like my friend as a new type of art. Rather than seeing hair and features and clothes and jewelry (a Renoir portrait, let’s say,

...do they instead see a Van Gogh? 

Next: Winter VII. English cooking.