If I mention a tearoom, I bet that puts you in mind of a small restaurant located in a grand hotel or a charming village. It will be decorated in either a flower pattern or pastel shades (or both), with comfortable chairs arranged around a low table, and fresh flowers on the table. Well-dressed guests—women mostly, but some men—pour loose leaf tea from fine China teapots into matching cups and nibble on crustless sandwiches, delicate pastries, and freshly baked scones served with jam and clotted cream. The conversation is light, friendly, and always polite.
Your image would be correct, in most cases, in modern times. But the history of the tearoom is more complex and meaningful than first meets the eye.
‘Power dwells with cheerfulness,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though we often think of cheerfulness as the opposite of power, as an insincere urge to liven things up, Emerson knew it to be a resource of the self, a tool for shaping our emotional lives that can help to relocate us in the social world and link us to community. At the present time, as we confront wave after wave of bad news sweeping the planet, cheerfulness is worth our consideration.
"When you're dealing with an octopus who's being attentively curious about something, it is very hard to imagine that there's nothing experienced by it," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. "It seems kind of irresistible. That itself is not evidence, that's just an impression."
Given this hunch as a starting point, how do you begin to explore the consciousness of an animal so unlike ourselves?
The feeling of being haunted has a way of collapsing one’s sense of direction and space. The presence of something blankets the world like mist, lingering, but impossible to locate. The feeling is inevitably followed by the question, “is it all in my head?” Maybe I’m projecting the rumblings of my psyche out into the world. Or maybe there was a glitch in the realm of the unseen, and maybe I was lucky to catch a glimpse of the ineffable. (Or maybe I’m not being haunted, but the FBI agent assigned to watch my every move isn’t as discreet as he thinks he is.)
The lines between what is and is not real blur often in the brilliant new short story collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Afghan-American writer Jamil Jan Kochai.
After embellishing the 19th century with alternative histories and fantastic developments in four previous novels, beginning with her best-selling debut, “The Watchmaker of Filigree Street,” Natasha Pulley grounds her latest work in an actual 20th-century event. “The Half Life of Valery K” takes off from a 1957 nuclear explosion in the Soviet Union, which blasted mortally dangerous levels of radiation into the atmosphere, and the ensuing coverup by the Soviet government. Exhibiting all the storytelling skills that made her earlier books so readable and popular, Pulley also offers a piercing study of how a police state deforms individual psychologies, personal relationships and professional ethics.