The Daily Valdemar No. 16: March 28

Valdemar Andersen, Sketch for The Book of Tea, 1925.
Private collection.

Today's moment of calm is diving into the smallest of cartoons on the greatness in little things. In humans as in teacups:

"But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the teacup. Mankind has done worse".

Mankind has done worse indeed, words written by Okakura Kakuzô in The Book of Tea, in which he describes the origins and evolution of the art of drinking tea. Each cup of tea is distinctive from every other due the preparation of its leaves and the heat. It is telling its own story, as Okakura Kakuzô writes.

The present cup before us is less than 1 cm. tall on the paper. We can only guess if it is made of earthenware or porcelain, although we may know the source of inspiration for drawing that particular cup. It is more than probable that Valdemar may have held it in his hands at the Designmuseum Denmark, whose director was busy collecting for his museum and would have shown it to him personally. We have no way of knowing it for certain, though, in that their personal exchanges were a fleeting story of their own.

What would have drawn Valdemar to this one would have been the few strokes of the brush, connecting him to the one who made it in their mutual sense of aesthetics. The brush strokes indicate a motif of life growing and flowing and bent by the wind. A motif taken to its essence with but a few traces left on the surface and yet it creates lightness and movement adding to the story of heat evaporating and the tea slightly swirling within when holding the cup. It would each time be a story of harmony of life and beauty of the present:

 "In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself".

The Book of Tea was first published in 1906 and can be read at gutenberg.org here. It is advisable to have a cup of tea at hand while reading.