The Book of Tea

The book of tea
Bok av Okakura Kakuzō och Okakura Tenshin
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism - Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste.
Jag förväntade mig en bok om te och teceremonier. Jag känner att det inte riktigt var vad jag fick. Boken tog upp filosofi, konst, blommor och andra märkligheter och tyvärr ytterst lite om just te och själva teceremonin.

Det kan hända att man uppskattar boken mer efter ytterligare genomläsning, men jag orkar inte läsa den någon mer gång.