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Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people more boring.
Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive process, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.
Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape analysis. That aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee’s power changes over time. “Coffee,” Rossini told me, “is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time to write an opera.” This is true, but the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while – for a week or two at most – you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the beans even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time’ particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups in this manner. One can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary battleground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with a clattering of wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of the black water.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day; he thought he’d been poisoned and took to his bed. He was tall, slender, and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach to papier-mâché. There had been, on my part, a failure of observation.
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animations that looks like anger; one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience; one wants everything to proceed with the speed if ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing, one assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state though a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with momentum and bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: COFFEE WANTED ITS VICTIM.
(From “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”, By Honoré de Balzac)
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