Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot.

Adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath in, let it out slowly, and off we go.

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Now let's get to the reading.

Tonight's reading comes to us by way of listener recommendation.

We're reading The Book of... listener recommendation.

We're reading The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okura,

first published in 1906. Let's begin.

The Book of Tea, section one,

the Cup of Humanity.

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

In China, in the 8th century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The 15th century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism, T-ism.

T-ism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sorted facts of everyday existence.

It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.

It is essentially a worship of the imperfect as it is a tender attempt

to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

...