(Edinburg Café by Dieter Krehbiel)
For John Merrick
Three things I look for when I travel: a museum, a local library, and a good café. The first two I can spare with minor regret and sorrow; the third is indispensable.
When I look back now to the places I’ve visited what made those travels intensely alive were the solitary moments spent at the café. Drinking a cup of coffee, doing nothing, observing everything, reading a book, writing something. I left my heart in those cafés where I yearned for life and life yearned for me. Sometimes it felt as though that was all that I needed to get through in life: a good café to sit in while I forego the troubles of the world. To wage a different battle which includes the freshening aroma of coffee in your nostrils beneath the dim lights of a cozy café where the bartender is busily shooting the silence with the portafilter while the guests are armed to the teeth in their quest for aloneness. With a stubborn spirit like Melville’s Bartleby we drink our coffee with a fugitive whisper in our lips: “I would rather not to” is our response to the wearying invitation of the noisy, chaotic world. Aloneness—that, too is a powerful weapon.
To stop by a café with the aim of daydreaming is an act of refusal to participate in the amusements of the powerful: the despairing incarceration of productivity and the miserable onrush of progress. Coffee is a formidable weapon that makes idleness a kind of virtue. The very act of drinking coffee in a local café becomes an extraordinary performance of being human by upholding the integrity of the small, the local, the traditional, the creative, the simple, the quiet, the slow, and the unknown. The cafés we hang out in speak of which side we belong.
The best cafés are those which shut us in. Cafés are territories of inclusion. Where one can behave and yet be aimless, be quiet and be invisible. No wonder some poets have written their most loved poems in a café. For there is no place in which love can name itself than in a place of aimlessness, quiet, and invisibility.
To be shut in is to wander into inner territories which nowadays nobody seems to trespass for fear of finding out that the needs of the soul are unglamorous. To wonder is only possible without the itchy interruption of publicity. One who truly wonders is invisible to the world. And there is an unadulterated joy in the condition of not having to publicize one’s innerness. The Book of Disquiet by that sublime Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is an incomparable homage to this rare joy. Rare because today anything that is not made visible by photography and promoted by social media is a kind of disappointment.
“I’m a navigator engaged in unknowing myself. I’ve overcome everything where I’ve never been. And this somnolence that allows me to walk, bent forward in a march over the impossible, feels like a fresh breeze.”
Unknowing oneself is the proper stuff of wondering, daydreaming. Where better else to succumb to such enterprise than in the somnolent air of the café?
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