by Bill Kent
Until recently, I had invented only one prayer in my life: Let me not forget the pleasure of a cup of tea.
I came upon it on a cold day when I was working in a supermarket: my first full time job after college. I had imagined that this job–all this college English-and-Religion double major (minors in History and Classics) could land after I was turned down by a bookstore and the Washington Post, and could not stand the hour-and-a-half each way, double-bus commute to a kitchen supply store–would be sufficiently mindless and minimally remunerative so I could do my writing in the mornings, evenings or whenever everybody else in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood was out having fun in restaurants and nightclubs.
I soon learned that any kind of work takes something out of you. Work it drains the well of energy and motivation that, in the best circumstances, needs time to refill. I had too many long minutes when I could put much on the page, or, worse, what I put on the page was rejected by magazines whose editors had no idea what it’s like to work on a cold day in a supermarket, hoping for a published short story born from so much toil and trouble would make it all worthwhile.
A wise person might have told me that work of any kind, be it making your bed or steering the misfortune of a vast, multinational financial empire, has inherent rewards, many of which aren’t obvious, or remain unknown for a long time. But all I felt at the time was drained, exhausted and incapable of achieving anything other than the fast, focused, manual labor that the supermarket demanded.
And so, on a cold morning when all I could do was trudge through the snow in old clothing that let the chilling wind freeze my skin, I went to the dim, dingy back of the supermarket where wet, cruddy boxes of what was supposed to sell that day towered so high you couldn’t see the ceiling lights. There I joined the people on the day shift waiting until the preposterously stingy owners arrived with a key to open the front door, sat down on a crate and let someone give me a ceramic cup of tea, whose warmth radiated outward, into my frigid fingers, up my arms–
When I brought it to my face and caught a scent that wasn’t decomposing you-don’t-want-to-know that wafted through the cracked insulation around the walk-in refrigerator. The tea touched my lips and filled my mouth with a hot, briny tang that burned away the wet cold that numbed my face.
The stubborn, critical part of my brain noticed that this wasn’t a fancy tea that I used to drink when I lived off campus and thought I was so sophisticated when I tossed leaves from a tin into a cup, doused them with water from a wabi sabi kettle, stirred them with a Japanese tea whisk and felt I was sooooooooo Zen.
The rest of me simply ignored the snide sophisticate and wallowed in joy: what I drank was good, it hit the spot, it was just what I needed!
And it was so easy. I didn’t have to wake up early in the morning and figure out how to drag my story’s characters out of trouble. I didn’t have to suffer the distant refusal of editorial gatekeepers to recognize that SOME DAY this unloved manuscript will be celebrated as a nascent indication of my waking greatness.
Nahh. It was just a cup of tea. Common. Simple. Free, in that the bag came from a box of expired tea bags that shared secondary space below the powdered creamer and the no-label instant coffee jar, the single plastic spoon and the battered electric water boiler that, until I had my cup of tea, was the only heat I felt in the place.
Never forget this, I told myself. Never forget the simple things that are free, easy and surprisingly plentiful. Never forget that there’s more to life than dreams come true, ambition fulfilled, goals achieved, seeing my writing in the New York Times and the Washington Post (which I would do, ten years later, but who would have known then?). Never forget the pleasure of a cup of tea.
Now I have a second one: never forget the beauty of the printed page.
Though the floor beside my bed, the table adjacent to my comfy chair, and the shelves in every other room tower with hundreds of books I have yet to open, I stopped reading a few months ago.
I’m not sure why, beyond the uneasy notion that what I was reading (mostly history and biography, with fiction and poetry for fun) didn’t seem “real” anymore. It’s one thing to look at a book about some famous person who lived and died before I was born, whose every twitch and twiddle could be shown to have made a difference, save civilization catastrophe and bring about the beginning of the world as we know it, and say, “what does this have to do with me?” It’s another to question the truth of a text, of the very words that can only be read one after the other, and with some difficulty (I had eye surgery a while back). Yes, we live surrounded by texts that we trust to be important, meaningful, necessary and true. But they are still texts: words (or numbers, symbols and images) that we string together in our brains so that we may approach what it is we believe to be important, meaningful, necessary and true.
I read newspapers and magazines. I glanced at the dour events, as well as the weather chart, on the morning and evening news. I read some of the junk mail sent to me, just to see if it was really junk.
It was.
But in order to understand how junky it all was, I had to interpret it. Texts don’t speak to us. Interpreters do. What they say, and what we hear, depends on many things. Someone who doesn’t know English and has never seen an octagonal red sign posted at the entrance to a potentially dangerous intersection (or, worse, thinks such things don’t pertain to him) is not going to STOP before rushing in. Most of us would rather not read the ingredients posted on a chocolate bar wrapper before we eat the candy. How many of us would play the lottery if we could make sense of the statistical likelihood of winning?
I began to think about this and decided that there may be other available insights into what is important, meaningful, necessary and true. I began to look more closely at the sky and landscape as I walked our dogs. I searched for glimpses of the things I did not typically see as I drove to the mall or surfed the Internet.
I can’t tell you if what I found was equivalent to the joys of reading Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson and so many of my favorite science fiction writers for the first time.
So I picked up my Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, turned to a page at random, and read something I didn’t understand at all. Then I read another that I did.
I opened a book about the history of diplomacy, paused at a difficult passage and noticed how easy it was to think about what I had read, and arrive at some kind of understanding, or judgement, about it. Did this make sense to me? And if it did, was I savoring that flicker of light inside my head as a part of my world that was somehow distant, blurry or merely unknown, became know?
If yes, I read more. It is simply a beautiful thing to see words on a page without the glaring snarky advertisements, noisy pop-up ads and the so many other insidious distractions that pull your eyes this way and that, making just about any session in front of a cell phone, computer screen or the big TV streaming stuff that so often is not worth the time and money–so exhausting that you find yourself empty of energy, incapable of pausing, thinking and otherwise enjoying your day?
I’m not saying that we should cut the cable, go off the grid and otherwise isolate ourselves from the greatest cultural connector in human history. But I am questioning the wisdom in exposing ourselves to so much stuff, without the critical capacity to decide what is worth our while, that it ultimately numbs us to what is, and always has been, important, meaningful, necessary and true.
Because even if you have an ad blocker, things pull your attention away. The fun of indulging silly whims, the thrill of shopping without leaving your comfy chair, the endless opinions, reactions, declamations, bullying and belittling on social media–drains us, weakens us, uses us up.
The printed page can do that, too, but it doesn’t move so fast. We can get really mad at what might be happening in the news, but, if it’s on paper, we turn the page, or push it away. We’re not being controlled. We’re far more in control of what see, hear, feel and now, as much as we are in control of the food we cook for ourselves.
Like that cup of tea, it can be a simple pleasure. It can be a hope and a prayer. Let us never forget the beauty of a printed page, so that we can find in it what nurtures us, sustains us and, every once in a while, reminds us of what really matters.
That Bill Kent 