Coffee in Arcadia

When you don’t have regular half-and-half for your morning coffee, don’t dismay. Just dig a little deeper into that fridge to find leftover whipping cream (for those holiday treats) and your staple almond milk.

Turns out, a dash of whipping cream and a tot of almond milk is ah-may-zing in coffee. It’s certainly different that half-and-half, to be sure. Nutty and lighter than milk, so it also changes the body of the coffee. But it’s great. Especially if it’s too early to put on proper clothes and brave the 10 degree weather to go to the store.

Nearly every time I add milk to my coffee I think of Tom Stoppard, specifically, Arcadia. See, there’s a bit in that play about jam and rice pudding, it being a lesson in chaos theory:

When you stir rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself around making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink, just as before.

-Tom Stoppard, Arcadia. Act 1, scene 1

Tom Stoppard is a burr in my heart. I chase the themes and motifs and metaphors and deeper meanings through his plays, but just when I think I can catch them, they vaporize – smoke in my hands. I love Stoppard because he continues to be challenge; I chafe at Stoppard because he continues to be a challenge. His language is deceptively simple, his meanings rooted in more layers than the pages of the book itself.

That is why, eight years after first reading Arcadia I return to it with my morning coffee. Eight years later I am still contemplating the jam and rice pudding and its function to the play, and the function of chaos theory to my daily life.

I’m not sure I’m much closer to digging out the gem of meaning than I was eight years ago, but that’s okay. Stoppard and I continue to struggle, but in the meantime he’s left me with a daily reminder of why I do struggle. The outcome of the challenge changes with me, its meaning growing and adapting as my own roots reach still deeper connections between literature and life.