Gives Me a Headache

Being October, I'm swamped at work, especially on the weekends, so in accordance with the prophecy tradition, I like to post scary stories or film clips on the weekends. One of the weirdest of the 'weird tales', by modern standards, is Green Tea, by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu. The story concerns a young author who descends into madness and hallucination becauTea was my companion-at first the ordinary black tea, made in the usual way, not too strong:se he... uhhhh... drinks green tea:


"I wrote a great deal; I wrote late at night. I was always thinking on the subject, walking about, wherever I was, everywhere. It thoroughly infected me. You are to remember that all the material ideas connected with it were more or less of the beautiful, the subject itself delightfully interesting, and I, then, without a care." He sighed heavily. "I believe, that every one who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something--tea, or coffee, or tobacco. I suppose there is a material waste that must be hourly supplied in such occupations, or that we should grow too abstracted, and the mind, as it were, pass out of the body, unless it were reminded often enough of the connection by actual sensation. At all events, I felt the want, and I supplied it. Tea was my companion-at first the ordinary black tea, made in the usual way, not too strong: but I drank a good deal, and increased its strength as I went on. I never, experienced an uncomfortable symptom from it. ! began to take a little green tea. I found the effect pleasanter, it cleared and intensified the power of thought so, I had come to take it frequently, but not stronger than one might take it for pleasure. I wrote a great deal out here, it was so quiet, and in this room. I used to sit up very late, and it became a habit with me to sip my tea--green tea--every now and then as my work proceeded. I had a little kettle on my table, that swung over a lamp, and made tea two or three times between eleven o'clock and two or three in the morning, my hours of going to bed. I used to go into town every day. I was not a monk, and, although I spent an hour or two in a library, hunting up authorities and looking out lights upon my theme, I was in no morbid state as far as I can judge. I met my friends pretty much as usual and enjoyed their society, and, on the whole, existence had never been, I think, so pleasant before."


Ahhhh, yes, ordinary black tea, the crushed and oxidized occidentalized tea favored by Westerners, rather than those inscrutable Easterners with their hallucination-inducing green tea. Le Fanu's tale is perhaps the second best cautionary tale about tea, second only to Rabbit's Kin:





I first ran into this tale in the course of Tor Books' wonderful Lovecraft Reread series.