What I needed, said my wife, was a cup of tea.
I never drink the stuff, but I was too sick to argue. So I said, “Sure. Tea would be fine.” I drank it and didn’t ask questions. Drank a cup or two a day over the next week, and when I was feeling better, I remembered that George Orwell had written something about the proper way to brew a cup of tea. I knew that he wouldn’t approve of the way we did it in our house: Pour water into a cup, then put the cup in the microwave and when the water is boiling dunk a teabag into it. When the water turns the color you see in tannin-stained swampwater, the tea is ready for drinking.
I own the four volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters and have gone to them so often that the pages are falling from the bindings. I looked up the essay on brewing the proper cup of tea.
Orwell is, unsurprisingly, plain spoken and uncompromising. There are eleven rules. Among them:
I read the essay beguiled, as always, by the effortless clarity Orwell manages with his prose and more than a little ashamed by my use of the microwave and, God help us all, tea bags.
I also pondered the sensibility of Orwell, a figure who seems to loom larger and larger in our contemporary consciousness.
There is a near universal awareness of Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. The book enjoyed a surge in sales after the election of Donald Trump. The title, 1984, is a sort of all-purpose, shorthand signifier for anything unpleasantly heavy-handed spawned by politics, government, or the state. Does a day go by without one thing or another being described as “right out of 1984“?
Orwell was writing about the end point on the road to totalitarianism. The ultimate state. It was something he’d seen coming since he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, had been seriously wounded, and then fled for his life when the people in his volunteer militia were declared enemies of the state by their Soviet puppet-masters.
When he returned home and wrote the truth about the Stalinists in Spain, he was blacklisted in respectable intellectual circles. He neither apologized, nor caved. But, then, he was as certain that he was right about the Soviet Union as he was about . . . well, how to brew a proper cup of tea. Orwell didn’t do ambiguity and ambivalence.
He was also something of a political enigma. He called himself a “democratic socialist,” but he wasn’t optimistic about the chances such an arrangement would ever come to pass. He was certainly not a “socialist” in the fashion of Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union before it found itself on the ash heap of history.
But, then, Sanders is that disagreeably modern sort—the thoroughly political animal. He is brittle and unyielding and humorless because, in his world, everything comes down to politics. Orwell was the other thing. He understood the paradoxes of modern politics and was onto the tyrannies of political correctness long before the phrase became current, but . . . he also appreciated a good cup of tea. It could be said, in contemporary parlance, that he had a life.
He also enjoyed a pint and wrote of his favorite pub, the Moon Under Water, whose
Orwell itemized the ten qualities that made this the ideal pub, and while reading the piece you can practically taste the stout and smell the tobacco smoke. Then, finally, he comes clean:
He had, then, a feeling for the daily satisfactions that tend to be neglected when a passion for politics takes over. Orwell was fond of gardening and he wrote about it in his diaries and journals. He was an angler and when he went into the hospital for the last time, he took his fly rod and tackle with him, thinking he would make his way to a trout stream when he got well and was released. The tackle was still there, with his body. He was 46.
He left behind 1984 and Animal Farm and the many other books for which he is remembered. The world still reads—and requires—those books. But you wonder if it would have been possible for Orwell to write them—to take on totalitarianism, as he did—if he hadn’t been the sort of person who cultivates attachments to the ordinary pleasures of life.
We live in a time of ungrounded political passion. These aren’t the 1930s, but the passions are ugly enough and it is hard to get away from them. And we are told that on some political questions, nothing less than the future of the planet is in play.
Maybe so. But after a while, you’ve had enough. You turn off CNN and go pull weeds in the garden and enjoy the aroma of freshly turned earth. Brew yourself a cup of tea, being careful to take the pot to the kettle. Go fishing if you can, or dream about it if you can’t. Or head for a place you know where they have an interesting IPA on tap.
All that other stuff will still be there when you get back. And be there, for that matter, forever more.
That is, unless climate change gets us first.
