Last year, UD introduced a new category on this blog —TEA.

She’s a serious tea drinker, mainly Marco Polo, and she wanted a place on the blog to write about what the plant means to her.

She’s written a poem for this blog about tea.

There’s a new documentary film out – The Meaning of Tea – which evokes the cultures and flavors of tea. Here’s the trailer. One of the people interviewed in the film gave me my post title. He says preparing and drinking a cup of tea creates a moment of windless calm within the frenzy of life.

There’s probably some sort of cosmic convergence (UD hasn’t thought enough about it yet) between UD‘s idea of the university as a place apart, a place of repose, of thought for the sheer joy of thought, the sheer delight of putting the mind in motion without worrying much about questions of utility, and UD‘s delight in the silent musing business of the brew.

UD‘s life perhaps appears to some visitors to her blog stereotypically professorial, with its not terribly social round of reading, writing, gardening, and piano playing. And drinking tea. UD doesn’t drive; she doesn’t watch tv; she goes shopping when family members tell her that her clothes are falling apart. The sabbatical she just completed mainly involved walking along beaches, thinking, and then coming inside and typing.

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock must be the most famous tea poem, and here tea conveys a timid obscure maundering existence:

… Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

… Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

… And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

Prufrock’s foggy little life – the life of nightmare pedants like Casaubon in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, who substitute books for the human relationships they fear – might meet its metaphor in the measuring out of one teaspoon after another until the end of that life; but the meaning of tea, surely, is more than this, a richer mix.

Yet UD resists the opposite interpretive tendency, the counter-Prufrockian take on tea in which the drink represents not merely the secret to great health and mental acuity (one constantly reads these claims, especially about undrinkable green tea), but a vehicle of vedic bliss. Tea has meaning, but it is more elusive than this.