Tea

We unmask the mountebanks by showing that everyone’s a charlatan. The most common things are miracles we fail to understand— our kitchen lit at the flick of a switch, and water boiling in a pot. We boil water to make tea with leaves from a camellia in India. We don’t know how two people could possibly understand each other. We think we understood everything, but that’s from something in the tea. From this stimulant arises the equivalent of genies, fairies, wizards, and poets.