Retreat, as of today, is in the air. We dynamic postmoderns will race through the 5 Stages (Incredulity, Anger, Irony, Snark, RETREAT), and conclude on the one that will have us eyeing that extra, kind of do-nothing room in the house and sizing it up as a site of Stoic Elaboration — a place where you bolster yourself with Marcus Aurelius and with bolsters.
This sort of thing. Ideally, you want high windows and a view - urban or rural, but something of interest to contemplate as you sip your Senecan Brew. On stormy days, switch to What does not kill me makes me stronger-esque Nietzschean aphorisms. Or the astringent poetry of Weldon Kees.
... Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are involved.
You are involved; no point, even in your tranquil new tearoom, in being uninvolved. Daily books and teas and views stimulate and calm you (all good tea stimulates and calms), and ready you and steady you for the bellowing bastards abroad. Your tearoom is indeed a retreat from imperiling stupidity; but, you know, as Henry James put it:
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
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More on emergent tearoom culture after I sit on the beach for awhile.