On Tea

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Title:     On Tea
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

When I was a boy--

What a phrase! What memories! O! Noctes Coenasque Deum! Why, then, is there something in man that wholly perishes? It is against sound religion to believe it, but the world would lead one to imagine it. The Hills are there. I see them as I write. They are the cloud or wall that dignified my sixteenth year. And the river is there, and flows by that same meadow beyond my door; from above Coldwatham the same vast horizon opens westward in waves of receding crests more changeable and more immense than is even our sea. The same sunsets at times bring it all in splendour, for whatever herds the western clouds together in our stormy evenings is as stable and as vigorous as the County itself. If, therefore, there is something gone, it is I that have lost it.

Certainly something is diminished (the Priests and the tradition of the West forbid me to say that the soul can perish), certainly something is diminished--what? Well, I do not know its name, nor has anyone known it face to face or apprehended it in this life, but the sense and influence--alas! especially the memory of It, lies in the words "When I was a boy," and if I write those words again in any document whatsoever, even in a lawyer's letter, without admitting at once a full-blooded and galloping parenthesis, may the Seven Devils of Sense take away the last remnant of the joy they lend me.

When I was a boy there was nothing all about the village or the woods that had not its living god, and all these gods were good. Oh! How the County and its Air shone from within; what meaning lay in unexpected glimpses of far horizons; what a friend one was with the clouds!

Well, all I can say to the Theologians is this:

"I will grant you that the Soul does not decay: you know more of such flimsy things than I do. But you, on your side, must grant me that there is Something which does not enter into your systems. That has perished, and I mean to mourn it all the days of my life. Pray do not interfere with that peculiar ritual."

When I was a boy I knew Nature as a child knows its nurse, and Tea I denounced for a drug. I found to support this fine instinct many arguments, all of which are still sound, though not one of them would prevent me now from drinking my twentieth cup. It was introduced late and during a corrupt period. It was an exotic. It was a sham exhilarant to which fatal reactions could not but attach. It was no part of the Diet of the Natural Man. The two nations that alone consume it--the English and the Chinese--are become, by its baneful influence on the imagination, the most easily deceived in the world. Their politics are a mass of bombastic illusions. Also it dries their skins. It tans the liver, hardens the coats of the stomach, makes the brain feverishly active, rots the nerve-springs; all that is still true. Nevertheless I now drink it, and shall drink it; for of all the effects of Age none is more profound than this: that it leads men to the worship of some one spirit less erect than the Angels. A care, an egotism, an irritability with regard to details, an anxious craving, a consummate satisfaction in the performance of the due rites, an ecstasy of habit, all proclaim the senile heresy, the material Religion. I confess to Tea.

All is arranged in this Cult with the precision of an ancient creed. The matter of the Sacrifice must come from China. He that would drink Indian Tea would smoke hay. The Pot must be of metal, and the metal must be a white metal, not gold or iron. Who has not known the acidity and paucity of Tea from a silver-gilt or golden spout? The Pot must first be warmed by pouring in a little _boiling_ water (the word _boiling_ should always be underlined); then the water is poured away and a few words are said. Then the Tea is put in and unrolls and spreads in the steam. Then, in due order, on these expanding leaves _Boiling_ Water is largely poured and the god arises, worthy of continual but evil praise and of the thanks of the vicious, a Deity for the moment deceitfully kindly to men. Under his influence the whole mind receives a sharp vision of power. It is a phantasm and a cheat. Men can do wonders through wine; through Tea they only think themselves great and clear--but that is enough if one has bound oneself to that strange idol and learnt the magic phrase on His Pedestal, [Greek: ARISTON MEN TI], for of all the illusions and dreams men cherish none is so grandiose as the illusion of conscious power within.

* * * * *

Well, then, it fades.... I begin to see that this cannot continue ... of Tea it came, inconsecutive and empty; with the influence of Tea dissolving, let these words also dissolve.... I could wish it had been Opium, or Haschisch, or even Gin; you would have had something more soaring for your money.... _In vino Veritas. In Aqua satietas. In_ ... What is the Latin for Tea? What! Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: On Tea

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