Page 34 In the small cafés of English towns, there is still a custom in which one customer “pays for” another. If one traces it to its source, one finds that the English picked up the habit from the Turks. In Turkey, when you walk into a café and have just ordered your coffee, you may suddenly hear someone in the room shout, “It’s on me!” The proprietor will then put your bill on the account of the customer who called out. Perhaps he is your friend, perhaps he wants to get acquainted with you… At that point, you not only have to walk over and thank her, but also greet everyone present. If you are an elder, everyone will rise to greet you and offer you the most comfortable seat.////—So that means I’m the one treating… If someone else shouted “It’s on me!” at me, I’d be more than happy to accept it~
Page 40 (1701…) In addition to denouncing coffee for its “physical poison,” wives also issued “moral condemnation.” On their pamphlets they wrote: “Coffee makes those diligent and cautious people who hope to rise appear decadent and depraved. Before they step into the coffeehouse, they are mostly hardworking, ambitious students, scholars, or rational merchants. Once they get there and meet acquaintances, they sit for three or four hours at a stretch. Acquaintances keep arriving in the coffeehouse, and so they sink in without noticing; as a result, they waste the whole day, spending five or six hours every day idling away in the coffeehouse!”////—If one day I am denounced like this too, then my plan will have succeeded.
Page 42 The Bach era was the golden age of coffee’s spread across Europe. Bach himself was not only a “super fan” who loved coffee; he also persuaded his friends, pupils, and admirers to drink it. In Bach’s time, coffee was flourishing in cities all over Germany. Coffeehouses were not only important social venues, bustling with patrons, but also musical salons that provided spaces for small performances. Because imported goods were expensive, many citizens restricted their children’s coffee drinking. In 1732, under the influence of caffeine, Bach had a sudden flash of inspiration and composed, for the “Music Society,” a “coffee musical” on this theme—Musical No. 211—which premiered at a Leipzig coffeehouse and was a great success.////—I just reposted that piece of music.
Page 61 Scientists such as Newton were also regulars at coffeehouses in their lifetimes. For example, in London the Grecian Coffee House and the Marine Coffee House, right next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, were haunts Newton and his colleagues often visited. The clientele of the Grecian Coffee House was mostly distinguished members of the Royal Society, while the regulars at the Marine Coffee House were a mixed lot: not only scientists and scholars, but also many sailors and navigators. Sailors and navigators, who contended with nature year after year, hoped to learn more about nature from scientists, while scientists were happy to display the value of their research. From this perspective, the coffeehouse became the earliest lecture hall for popular science. It was also a testing ground for the combination of science and commerce. Coffeehouses were a breeding ground for financial reform and practice. Many modern business models—such as insurance, lotteries, joint ventures, loans, and even equity stakes in technology—originated in the beneficial practices of early coffeehouse life. …
Page 77 This imported beverage, which the English at the time derided as “black soup mixed with coal ash and the smell of stinky shoes,” unexpectedly won the favor of Oxford professors and students, who found that although coffee tasted bitter, it helped them stay up all night with ease and could even spark wonderful inspiration. It is said that Dr. Harvey, the discoverer of blood circulation, bequeathed the 56 pounds of coffee in his possession to his colleagues in London before he died, on the condition that they must gather once a month to drink it and exchange research results. This not only shows that Harvey advocated collective collaboration in science, but also indirectly demonstrates his absolute affirmation of coffee’s effects. Later, small salons in the form of coffee drinking became increasingly fashionable, until someone took the lead in founding an academic Oxford Coffee Club, where like-minded people gathered to exchange views, give lectures, and debate; this was theushi predecessor of the “Royal Society,” the cradle of British science. At that time, there were no coffeehouses in England yet.
Page 104 Halley and Newton were not only a pair of geniuses who complemented each other brilliantly in the history of British science; they were also fanatics and eccentrics who loved coffee so much that they even frequented the same coffeehouse. According to records, they also held scientific lectures in coffeehouses, conducted scientific experiments, and even dissected a dolphin by hand on a coffee table. Newton’s epoch-making scientific masterwork, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and the System of the World, was conceived under the inspiration of coffee at this coffeehouse. 1683, on a summer evening, Halley, Hooke, and the astronomer Christopher Wren were, as usual, idly chatting together at the Grecian Coffee House. In the wide-ranging banter, the talk turned to the motion of celestial bodies. Wren asked: why is the motion of celestial bodies an elliptical curve? Neither of his companions said a word. Wren put down 40 shillings and bet that whoever found the answer first would get the money. …略……////—I’ve heard this story many times, but the versions I heard before didn’t seem to mention the coffeehouse…
Page 108 In fact, ever since London’s Grecian Coffee House inspired Newton and Halley, caffeine has kept producing marvels in the scientific world. Besides the Nobel Prize-winning chemists Martin and Singer mentioned above, coffeehouses also preserve the brilliant stories of two pairs of gifted teacher-student duos in twentieth-century physics—the German physicist Sommerfeld and his Austrian student Pauli, and the Danish physicist Bohr and his German student Heisenberg. Back then, these two pairs of teachers and students often gathered in Munich coffeehouses to discuss cutting-edge topics in an unrestrained way. ………… Some important branches of modern mathematics, such as set theory, topology, and functional analysis, are tightly associated with the names of several coffeehouses in prewar Europe. For instance, the theory of functions of a real variable and the idea of function spaces were gestated in two coffeehouses near the University of Lviv in Poland—the Scottish Café and the Roman Café. ………… The Lviv School, composed of professors and young scholars, used the Scottish Café as its base of activity. The famous Polish “mathematical poets” Banach, Ulam, and Mazur were the school’s main members. … They often spent ten or more hours at a stretch in the café, filling the tabletop with pencil-written advanced mathematical formulas. Some friends talked and laughed, some fell into deep thought, some objected, and some sipped their coffee with relish. The café owner felt sorry for the tables in his shop, but did not want to offend the customers, so he prepared a notebook in advance and, when the mathematicians came, laid it out on the coffee table together with the coffee—this became the world-famous Scottish Book that has been handed down to the present day. From 1935 to 1941, the notebook recorded 193 mathematical problems, and even now more than half of them remain unsolved!
Page 109 And then there is Einstein. In his youth he often hung out with friends at the Olympia Café, which he called the “Olympia Academy.” …
Page 112 “If someone is weighed down with studies or has been tired from a day’s work, where can he go to dispel fatigue and lift his spirits? Young people and ordinary citizens need one or two hours of recreation every evening; where could be safer and more beneficial than the coffeehouse? It is well known that reading in a coffeehouse is far superior to reading in a bookstore; and besides the coffeehouse, where else is there such a library that can provide opportunities for discussion?” So wrote an English scholar as early as 1675.
Page 123 Throughout the entire nineteenth century, Parisian cafés were full of celebrities and legend. Almost every café name was closely tied to a name revered by later generations: Brébant Café with the writer Alexandre Dumas, the famous publishing brothers Goncourt, and the novelist Maupassant; Tortoni Café with the literary giant Victor Hugo and the Romantic poet Lamartine; New Athens Café with the Impressionist painters Van Gogh, Monet, Lautrec, and Degas; Voltaire Café with Gauguin, Cézanne, the sculptor Rodin, and the modernist poet Baudelaire; Café de la Closerie des Lilas with the Surrealist poet Apollinaire and the aesthete Oscar Wilde; Le Deux Magots with the Symbolist poets Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and the writer Gide; and the youngest café of the late nineteenth century—the Café de Flore, opened in 1898, (Sartre and Beauvoir)…
Page 132 The English writer A. E. Schou wrote a sentence in his Paris! Paris! that cuts right to the bone: “In Paris, the reason you must start from the café table is that everything in Paris starts from the café table.”
Page 140 That the Café de Flore has remained famous to this day is also thanks to the most eye-catching and far-reaching “contractual couple” of twentieth-century France—Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. To this day, the café still keeps their seats by the window, and the menu prints quotations that read like Sartre advertising slogans: “The nerves of freedom pass through the path of Flora…”////—Shall we try one too? “The King of the Pirates once anchored at New Island…” Uh…
Page 177 18th century, a literary café in Vienna appeared that was on equal footing with billiards. The billiard enthusiasts competed elegantly upstairs, while poets and writers argued loudly downstairs… This tradition has continued to the present day. So it was hardly surprising that I found a billiard room in the “Paris–Texas” café in Budapest.
Page 179 In Vienna, the King of the Waltz, Johann Strauss, favored the “Silver Café,” while Schubert often sat dazed in the Café Bögner on the Ringstrasse, … It is said that in those days Mozart was not only a musical prodigy but also a fine billiards player, and in his leisure time he often summoned friends here for competition. Gathered around the billiard table were mostly musicians, actors, and instrumentalists. Now, the bust of that former patron is enshrined there like an idol, receiving homage from visitors from all directions.
Page 182 On the eve of the French Revolution, a short young military officer with a fleshy face and a sturdy build entered the Café Procope in Paris. When it came time to settle the bill, he discovered he had not brought enough money, so he awkwardly pawned his military cap to the waiter… If not for that little incident, the café’s memory would have lost one earthshaking name—Napoleon. Another Paris café Napoleon liked to go to was the Régence Café, famous for chess matches. Although he liked to play chess, his skill was mediocre and his attacks were rash; he was often beaten soundly by his opponents, and so he complained in exasperation: “This thing is not rigorous enough as a science, but as a game it is too hard.” To this day, the brass-edged chess table Napoleon used back then is still preserved in the Régence Café.
Page 192 Speaking of the Central Café, one must mention the much-loved “Song of the Coffeehouse” written by his literary crony Peter Altenberg at the beginning of the twentieth century…:
If you are filled with worries, whatever kind of worries they may be—go to the coffeehouse!
If your girlfriend has no time, even for an acceptable reason—go to the coffeehouse!
If you want to be a stern-faced official or a doctor—go to the coffeehouse!
If you earned only four hundred crowns but spent five hundred crowns—go to the coffeehouse!
If you are frugal yet still have nothing—go to the coffeehouse!
If you are hovering on the edge of suicide—go to the coffeehouse!
If you can’t find your faith anywhere—go to the coffeehouse!
If you despise humanity, but cannot live in isolation—go to the coffeehouse!
If no one is willing to lend you money anymore—go to the coffeehouse!
////—If you want to chat idly with the devil—go to the coffeehouse!
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Xin Dao
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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