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Coffee, an inseparable companion at night when you like telling incredible stories, inseparable but also unbeatable in exciting people’s imagination. Coffee becomes now the topic of this short anthology.
As caffeine stimulates and makes senses subtler, instead of making them drowsy, as it is indeed the case of alcohol, coffee has always been the favourite beverage of great thinkers and writers.
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«Coffee comes into the stomach and everything begins to move: ideas move forward like battalions of a great army on the battlefield; the battle begins. Memories march at the double like the ensigns of the battle array, the light cavalry of analogies comes forward vehemently at full gallop. Here comes the artillery of logic with baggage wagons and cartridges. Sudden and ingenious thoughts enter the fray as marksmen…» Honorè de Balzac |
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Voltaire maintained that coffee was a sort of poison: «I have continued to poison myself for more than fifty years and I have not died yet.» |
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Alexander Pope, who composed several poems about coffee, wrote: «Coffee certainly makes the politician wiser and let him see everything with half-closed eyes.» |
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Napoleone, being aware that there was something better than alcohol for his troops, wanted his troops to drink coffee, and said about it: «Plenty of strong coffee keeps me awake. Coffee gives out heat, an unusual strength, but also a pain accompanied by a certain pleasure. I do prefer to suffer than being insensitive.» |
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«Oh men with a sound mind, drink coffee and do not care about slanderers who denigrates it with brazen lies! Drink it, as much as you like, because in its flavour all worries vanish and its fire reduces in ashes the turbid thoughts of daily life.» Hadjibud from Medina (Arab jurist). |
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«Coffee has to be hot like hell,
black as the devil,
pure like an angel and
sweet as love.»
Talleyrand (1754-1838) |
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«What is essential is its aroma, it has something magic, it encloses all the energies released by people who have handed and treated it. Coffee, my dearest Lord, is much more than a plant. It is a sponge which for its entire life – from its birth to the moment it is roasted – absorbs the surrounding energies and vibrations. It retains, preserves and then elaborates these energies to give them back in the form of flavour, taste, vigour, and thought. Yes, my dearest Lord, thought is imprinted in coffee’s memory.»
Ramon, interpreter of coffee grounds. |
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«Oh coffee! You dispel fears, thou friend of God! You give good health, wisdom and truth back and you are as valuable as gold…»
Abd-al-Kadir |
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“Ode to black Coffee”
«Oh my dearest hot and black coffee,
whether in mocha, Turkish or true Serbian,
or only God knows what else may it be,
a gentleman at home, but not only limited to that;
when I see you in front of me,
you are just that good hot-steaming coffee.
You should know and you probably already know,
(but this is not the case of the reader, maybe),
that I couldn’t live without you,
my mind being down by bows:
oh, even worse would it be
shouldn’t be on my desk
a pot full of good coffee.
For instance, this bad rhyme
of “desk” with “coffee” is awful.
and what about the conditional?
It’s obvious, I’m depressed.
The sentence is tough:
I have not drunk coffee enough!
Now a remedy I shall not neglect
and I do start to work soon:
but for rhymes, use the dialect!
Oh, black blessed coffee
you works to perfection:
I well know it with satisfaction!
I beg you to pass through my throat, my fellow
but more than once,
turns the night into light, comes downwards
takes action, oh my coffee, and be hot like a furnace,
push the fire inwards,
protect myself from the external menace.
They say you produce heartthrob
you dispel the sleep and the nerves are strained.
But I do not know what pleasure you enjoy
in this life which consumes our health with no strain:
nothing life gives for nothing.
Money, glory, love, and so on.
Everything in the world is monotony.
Destiny closes its agony
with the same vice.
But of coffee the aroma is enough
to awaken the dead.
I do not care of the evil
who whispers slowly and slowly:
is caffeine a menace
which this damned life offers?
Life is all but illness
which leads to death and other things like that!
Until the fatal moment to you
rendered faithful, my good coffee.»
(Friedrich Torberg) |
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«Those two sit at the table in the café every day, for many hours, all by themselves, for ten years.
Is it a happy married couple? No, it’s a good coffee.» Alfred Polgar
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«Coffee, a sober beverage which deeply acts into the thoughts and which enhances, contrarily to the alcoholics, the clearness and conciseness of the spirit» wrote the great French historian Jules Michelet, who defined the introduction of coffee in France a happy revolution, «the great event which introduced new forms of life and brought an important contribution to the spiritual awakening of 1700. Coffee dispels the vacillating poetry of the hot-steaming fantasy and scatters the thunderbolts of truth». |
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