POSTS
More delicious than a thousand kisses
By hisham
Ever curious, people have brewed and smoked almost everything that protrudes in one form or another from the earth and then some. Coffee is, without a doubt, the most popular of these experiments.
The perfect brew follows the perfect roast. It’s a delightful play on our senses that begins with smell before sight. The smell primes us for an encounter with a dark, rich liquid. A liquid that promises to wake up our other senses as well as our body and mind. And that, it surely does.
The first sip quickly crescendos into the blend’s unique character. A rapid cascade follows. Traces of continents and countries and herdsmen amongst plantations meet, greet and dissipate. From Yemen to Brazil, and from Ethiopia to Sumatra, your everyday blend coffee is truly a multicultural experience in its own right. If you will pardon deficient nation labelling, coffee is developing countries in a cup.
From being banned in Mecca and Cairo for a short period of time, to the 1674 Women’s Petition Against Coffee in England, to other displeasures regarding its consumption, coffee has had its share of hate, misunderstanding and outright refusal by some.
How odd and quaint in reason that sounds to us now. For coffee is the anti-intoxicant and the primer for reason in times of lethargy. Could someone ever be intoxicated by extended, heightened reasoning? More so, could someone become impotent by heightened reasoning?
Time, art, science and the cubicle dweller amongst others are all the proof we need to disregard such silly notions. Can one imagine how different art would be without coffee? How different Balzac’s work might have been? How different your work would be?
Balzac argued that while coffee chases away sleep it is by no means a source of inspiration. Instead, the muse remains that which is already acquired and inherent in one way or another by the writer, the artist, and yes, the cubicle dweller. For coffee serves to only affect vitality, extending it beyond that which a mere mortal is accustomed to.
Bach, who used to be a regular at Leipzig’s Zimmerman coffeehouse, in his satirical Coffee Cantata (libretto by Christian Henrici) portrays a quite amusing conversation between a father and his coffee addicted daughter Lieschen:
Recitative Schlendrian: You wicked child, you disobedient girl, oh! When will I get my way? Give up coffee!
Lieschen: Father, don’t be so severe! If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.
Aria Lieschen: Mm! how sweet the coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses, mellower than muscatel wine. Coffee, coffee I must have, and if someone wishes to give me a treat, ah, then pour me out some coffee!
Coupled with good company in the form of a book, a paperpad and a pen, or a friend, coffee remains that elixir of spirit so vital to our interaction with both soul and society.
Come, dear Lieschen, I’ll pour you some coffee. For love can only get better with untiring reason!