Tea and Hawthorns
I was drinking tea this morning and had the most wonderful experience. The light shone through the window, perfectly illuminating my cup. You could see the steam. As a result of this beauty, I was quite intent on continuing to drink. I kept pouring water, refilling my cup, even as the flavor of the tea dulled. What began a cloudy green was, at the end, reduced to but a hint of its original color.
It struck me that at a certain point I was no longer continuing in the pursuit of flavor, but so that the experience would not end. And, in a way, even now I seek to continue it. Though the leaves themselves are beginning to compost, they carry on in my memory and these words.
I was reminded of this excerpt from Proust’s Search. It takes place while the main character is still young, and is about to leave the countryside for paris.
“That year my family fixed the day of our return to Paris rather earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket; a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on the steep little path near Tansonville, bidding farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches in my arms and, like a princess in a tragedy oppressed by the weight of these vain ornaments, with no gratitude towards the importunate hand which, in curling all those ringlets, had been at pains to arrange my hair upon my forehead, trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I had torn from my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at all moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of my battered headgear and my ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her. ‘Oh, my poor little hawthorns,’ I was assuring them through my sobs, ‘It isn't you who want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you've never done me any harm. So I shall always love you.’”
I think it is only natural to want to stay with that which is beautiful, to not let it end. But in the context of Proust, a desire for immortality of this sort is quite ironic. He, after all, believes that habit and repetition leads to indifference. It stands to reason that this is true, too, of beauty: if I had this experience of tea all the time, if he saw the hawthorns all the time, we would both cease to react to them as we did, to wish that they lasted forever. We would grow indifferent.
How tragic that beauty so often aspires to its own annihilation! And how ironic that it avoids oblivion only because it so often fails at holding onto us: Marcel leaves his hawthorns and goes to Paris, I empty out my tea, and we are left with memories of an experience of beauty. The slow, dulling march of repetition is put to an end, and that initial magic is able to live on. We are left but to look upon the memories of the hawthorns or tea fondly, their beauty preserved.
We are quite lucky, then, that beauty rarely has its way, that it rarely lives forever.
Such a beautiful post!