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japhy ryder’s recommendation
Flipping through a brittle old notebook, I’m wondering if this is the first mention I ever saw of The Book of Tea. I know I read it after seeing several mentions in a short span of time, but this roundabout recommendation by Gary Snyder might well have been the first. Funny that it’s incidental to my having included this spread — I saved it for the description of Japhy’s little hut-house. (Doesn’t sound like Kerouac ever read it, does it?)
And now I’m feeling extremely nostalgic about The Dharma Bums. Will have to reread.
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or, as Thoreau put it
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
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favorite passages from the book of tea
My last book of 2008, first of 2009, was a longtime favorite of mine and a philosophical classic, The Book of Tea. If you’re not familiar with it, it was published in 1906, written by art historian and curator Kakuzo Okakura. And as you can see from these passages — as with the tea ceremony itself — it's about far more than tea.
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then the cockroach says to the composer
I'm in line — a very long line — at Trader Joe’s tonight, so of course I pull out the wonderphone and start to read. The app opens to where I left off in Insect Dreams, with Gregor literally talking Charles Ives down off a ledge. I’m thinking to myself “I’m really more in the mood for Walden at the moment,” but I only have a few minutes anyway, right? So I turn the page:
I’m telling you, you can't make this shit up. Books have a way of colliding.
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as Wittgenstein said to the cockroach
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with thanks to mark doty
... she seemed neither to entertain nor to consider anything of our circumstance; she was beyond all that now. She did nothing but love us, and dwell in the world of collapse and delight.
—Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
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