Revolution
This train of thought began with a drink. I find coffee to be repellant. Yet I can’t help be envious of different coffee drinking cultures around the world. The French drinking at cafes. Italians drinking espresso after dinner. English with their silly tea ceremonies.
Wait, the English drink tea, not coffee. I like tea. And then isn’t it interesting how so many cultures around the world have these wonderful rituals around drinking caffeine? America has pretty lousy drinking rituals altogether, and caffeine is one of them. People line up in the morning around the break room perculator, small talk for a few minutes, and then retreated to their cubicles to drink the worst coffee in the world. Don’t get me started on the aweful beer culture.
So we don’t have good coffee rituals, though that is changing. Afterall, people go to Starbucks and drink marginally better coffee and sit around reading or in front of their laptops pretending to write a novel. Repellent, but more interesting.
It may surprise some people to learn that Russia has a strong tea culture. There is a ritual of drinking tea from a samovar.
Samovar is a strange word for a fancy Russian teapot warmer and water boiler. I encountered it often reading Chekhov. You see I am a fan of the great Russian Romantic literature. Gogol, Tolstoy, all are my friends but Chekhov most of all. I love the way he paints such a clear picture of his characters in such a short narrative. His stories are gritty, common, and full of the vigors of life. It is like street photography in short story form. I love the surreal way Gogol tells a story, like a waking dream. And yes, one day I will finish War and Peace.
I suppose you could call me a fan of Romantic art. After all, I love the Revolutionary music of Beethoven. I love the Romantic music that followed: Schubert, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Greig… such music.
Wasn’t the Romantic era revolutionary? Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica, changed music. It is written with such passion that still resonates in today’s world of synth beats, vocoders, guitar fuzz, screamo, and whatever they invent next week. Written during the age of Napoleon, it was originally given the title Buonaparte; a title that Ludwig crossed off the original manuscript so hard that it tore a hole in the page when he learned that Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Instead it was dedicated to the memory of a great man and named Heroic. Strange that the funeral march comes in the second movement instead of the last. What did he mean by that?
Napoleon. The conqueror. We tend to revile him in history here in America. History is, after all, written by the winners. I like Napoleon. We was daring. A dreamer. There are no great rewards without great risks. He enshrined ideals we still respect today: liberty, equality, and fraternity. He caused the eventual death of monarchy in Europe even though he tried to become one himself. Perhaps that inspired the famous Neitsche quote?
Some think of him as a great French warrior. He was a Corsican of Italian extract.
Wandering off into this dreamland of a heroic revolutionary era; a place of aristocrats and peasants and craftsmen and change was starting to increase at a frightening pace; yes I think that is a fair assessment. Didn’t it all end with World War One? The end of the Heroic era?
So I am going to start my own tea rituals. It probably won’t go well. After all, I don’t really believe in rituals myself. I don’t keep any rituals. Some people think they are a necessary part of human culture. I don’t like our culture so I suppose that is why I don’t keep any rituals, even those I invent myself. Too bad, I sometimes believe that tea would catch on if it was marketed better.
