overed only by one who mentally completed the incomplete.
The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the
tea-room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total
effect in relation to himself. Since Zennism has become the prevailing
mode of thought, the art of the extreme Orient has purposefully avoided
the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition.
Uniformity of design was considered fatal to the freshness of
imagination. Thus, landscapes, birds, and flowers became the favorite
subjects for depiction rather than the human figure, the latter being
present in the person of the beholder himself. We are often too much in
evidence as it is, and in spite of our vanity even self-regard is apt to
become monotonous.

In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence. The
various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that
no colour or design shall be repeated. If you have a living flower, a
painting of flowers is not allowable. If you are using a round kettle,
the water pitcher should be angular. A cup with a black glaze should not
be associated with a tea-caddy of black lacquer. In placing a vase of
an incense burner on the tokonoma, care should be taken not to put it in
the exact centre, lest it divide the space into equal halves. The pillar
of the tokonoma should be of a different kind of wood from the other
pillars, in order to break any suggestion of monotony in the room.

Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from
that of the Occident, where we see objects arrayed symmetrically on
mantelpieces and elsewhere. In Western houses we are often confronted
with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk
to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his
back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and
feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. Many a time
have we sat at a festive board contemplating, with a secret shock to our
digestion, the representation of abundance on the dining-room walls.
Why these pictured victims of chase and sport, the elaborate carvings
of fishes and fruit? Why the display of family plates, reminding us of
those who have dined and are dead?

The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it
truly a sanctuary from the vexations of the outer world. There and
there alone one can consecrate him