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Class with Tea

Class with Tea

Last updated on: December 4, 2020 at 8:42 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Class with Tea 2020-12-04T08:42:28-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Make beauty where you can, spending if you must, but be warned of those who do not care to try to do things as beautifully as possible. You need not gild a lily, they are already beautiful, but at the end of a hard slog of work, try for spoon full of sugar.

Twice a semester, our College has keystone sessions where faculty and students gather to discuss a great text for an entire day. One session is generally held in a tea shop, “Your Cup of Tea,” a bit of charming elegance hidden in a strip mall. This is very Houston. The house blend tea is very good and the food is just so. I have had tea in many places, from the expensive London tourist places (Harrods, Fortnum and Masons) to wonderful little nooks in cities from Oxford to Bath, but the experience at “Your Cup of Tea” holds up. The total package, a great book, excellent students, a great deal of tea in wonderful Christmas china, makes for academic jollification.

Our Provost is to be commended for giving us this experience.

And having “spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise. . .?”

To boldly paraphrase Dickens:

“It isn’t the money. It isn’t that, gentle reader. Our Provost has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our class light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

There are greater lessons to learn than the importance of (occasionally) having class with just a touch of class, but the great teachings often are built on the smaller. When we dress nicely, as we do for keystones, and as we did for our discussion of Pride and Prejudice, then we are reminded that while inner reality is most important, the outer should match the inner if possible. One of our teachers was the proprietor of “Your Cup of Tea” who worked hard to make things just so and in doing so taught us how our lesson could be made more beautiful. The room was full of Christmas and Jane Austen’s beautiful prose mixed well with the taste, smell, sight of something different from our normal classrooms.

It is more important to be beautiful on the inside than the outside, but inner beauty will naturally manifest in outer goodliness. A society is very broken when those people with inner beauty cannot show beauty to the world. We need beauty so badly! A measure of injustice is when the beautiful are made low and the ugly made high. When we gild the toilet and pave over the roses, then something is wrong.

Of course, we are not a wealthy College, usury is forbidden to us by God’s command. Snobs might point out our deficiencies. We are not fancy, but we did what we could in terms of beauty, just as we do what we can intellectually. We are not fit for Austen, she is beyond us intellectually, but getting a bit of Jane Austen is better for the soul than getting all of a Twitter feed.

Reading Pride and Prejudice was a reminder of this truth: the beautiful on the inside strive to be beautiful on the outside, while the ugly on the inside also labor to be beautiful on the outside. A cad like Wickham appears to be a gentleman. A real gentleman like Mr. Darcey may seem merely a snob, but appearances can be deceptive.

The plain lesson that a cad can imitate a gentleman is often repeated, even today. The duty of a gentleman to match his inner reality with his outer presentation is less preached. I have heard of churches suspicious of beauty in a lady or gentleman! This should not be! We do not “adorn,” but we can demonstrate what is real. The outer should match the inner lest cads like Wickham fool even a greater number of people.

The good should be as they are, beautiful, so that the painted on beauty of the wicked is not so tricksy.

We do the best we can: the homely amongst us doing what we can. The elegant even do better. We, the work a day professors, do not envy them their elegance nor do we look down on what we can do. Instead, we offer up the best we have to our students and to God. We make beauty where we can, as much as we can, without driving up debt.

All of life, not just education, could follow this ideal: beauty as great as possible, first inside, then outside. Every level of our being should and can be in harmony. The happiness this will give us will be as great as if it cost a fortune.

If you are in Houston, visit “Your Cup of Tea” and have a bit of affordable society.

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