Kakuzo Okakura’s 1906 Book of Tea, standard reading in aesthetics courses, sets out The Way of Tea Retreat, sets apart the tea-room as the very heart of considered, intentional, beautiful separation of oneself from a world which has suddenly become crushingly vile.
The littleness and fragility of the tea-room expresses its temporary nature: This is no permanent escapist chamber, but rather a place to which we have recourse, perhaps daily, to learn and relearn the discipline of “properly regulating our own existence on this tumultuous sea of foolish troubles which we call life… The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians or the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry.” And the art of tea – Teaism – lies in the quiet preparation and enjoyment of the smoky transformative brew which will somehow in its modest way be part of reconciling you to a hateful world, be part of allowing you a kind of flourishing within it. “We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon. Yet there is joy and beauty in the roll of billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit, or [even] ride upon the hurricane itself?”
Inside the personal sanctuary of the tea-room, where “even in the daytime the light in the room is subdued, for the low eaves of the slanting roof admit but few of the sun’s rays. Everything is sober in tint from the ceiling to the floor; the guests themselves have carefully chosen garments of unobtrusive colors. The mellowness of age is over all,” you may engage in soul-reanimation. The universe is dimmed for the ignition of your spark, something in the way of Henri Bergson’s élan vital, the creative energy immanent in us and subject always to diminishment by the world of other people. “It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment,” because all effort is toward the emergence of your presence and spiritedness; “fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials,” because the strength at issue here is your own.
