Are you, like Balzac, big coffee drinkers?
The author of The human comedy downed liters of coffee. Up to fifty cups a day, we repeat. The figure, at first glance, seems excessive. But as Balzac was in all things, it is not impossible. So much coffee, in any case, must not have helped him much to regulate his heart failure on a daily basis.
This man was crushed by the weight of debts as much as by health problems. Balzac consumed coffee to keep himself lit, to continue to burn everything, by accumulating the pirouettes offered by credit. He was moving headlong.
His creditors pursued him like bloodthirsty dogs. Anyone would have fallen for it. Not him. Nothing would have stopped him from continuing. He anticipated by challenging in his own way, as a great champion, this unbridled consumer society in which we are now all immersed to the point of drowning.
Balzac took care of his coffee himself. Always looking for the best grains, he assembled them in a clever blend of his own. A mixture whose concentration promised to wake up even a dead horse. It was fire, lava, lightning, hell.
“Coffee falls into your stomach,” writes Balzac. From then on, “everything is agitated”, he added. “Ideas move like the battalions of the Great Army on the field of battle, and the battle takes place. » And in the battle of his thoughts, when a general idea came to him after a sip of coffee, Balzac played the corporal. He stood to attention and loaded his sheet of paper.
Torrents of black water smeared Balzac’s stomach. The acidity ate away at him. His kidneys were affected. He will die from it.
Like other writers, Voltaire also consumed a lot of coffee. He abused it. But perhaps his constitution tolerated excesses better than others. Voltaire in any case liked to make fun of death. In one of his last letters, he wrote: “Death came to take me, but I dodged. » It wasn’t the coffee that got the better of him.
The liters of coffee that we pour down our throats every year do not transform us into Voltaire or Balzac. An old acquaintance probably drank more coffee than these two geniuses combined. Yet she never had enough momentum to lift even her little finger further than her nose. No, coffee does not guarantee alert minds.
Since coffee has become a liquid drug widely favored by all minds, even the most clouded, it has constituted a real social trait. So much so that we have given places the name of this liquid. Cafes are precious places. The art of discussion has developed quite a bit there.
In Sherbrooke, the most famous café, Bla-Bla, has been established in the city center for half a century. In recent days, it came very close to disappearing. The building next door burned down. It must be said that, for years, everything in this city center, as in many other municipalities, seems to be going up in smoke or simply being razed. How long will this new hole take to be filled? And above all, by what horror?
Our common areas, where the cafes were, have almost all been deserted. They were used for the benefit of concentration camps for goods set up on the outskirts of cities. Planetary signs have pushed us far from the centers, into orbit of our own living environments.
Global coffee consumption is expected to increase by almost 30% by 2030. Nearly half of the land available for growing coffee trees is at risk of disappearing by 2050 due to climate change. Guess how much a cup of coffee will end up costing…
Also in Sherbrooke, a coffee roasting company has invested in a “zero-emission” sailing cargo ship to transport its beans from far away. After supposedly “fair trade” coffee, here we are at the time of “sustainable” coffee? It would still be a lot of coffee to believe it with your eyes closed.
However, whatever happens, we continue, as if nothing had happened, to drink coffee taken from exploited lands and then transported over incredible distances. What does such a frenzy tell us? At the very least, it indicates our fatigue. But it also indicates the destruction of our own living environments.
As coffee-producing regions become warmer and scarcer, our common spaces, where coffee shops used to be, have almost all been deserted in favor of air-conditioned shopping centers on the outskirts of cities.
In an interview given to Duty at the beginning of the 21st centurye century, the Nobel Prize for Literature José Saramago noted that “more and more in the world, the only clean, illuminated, peaceful and quiet place is the shopping center… Everything that is aggressive is outside, while ‘inside it’s paradise. I can even imagine a world with shopping centers scattered in a desert of rubbish, dirt, corrupted water. […] I am like the doctor who makes an exact diagnosis and it is up to you to find the cure, to all of you, to all of us.” This is an observation, when we look at it closely today, which was not at all far from reality. Let’s talk frankly: what do our cities look like?
“There are six million of us, we need to talk to each other,” said a famous advertisement in the mid-1970s, which basically concluded that everything is fine. There are now 9 million of us in Quebec, according to Statistics Canada. Even when filled to the brim with coffee, we are no more a people of geniuses than others. To think and write about ourselves in the future, perhaps the time has come to do more than talk to each other, to see that we stop just blabbering around the coffee machine, in short, to really get out of our collective sleep.