No other place reinforces one’s propensity for aloofness than the café. Art studios and libraries are also sympathetic to aloofness but they are prone to intellectual and artistic intimidations. Cafés are apt to be more understanding of human frailty. They redeem us from all sorts of outer interrogations. They are the refuge of non-rational people who cherish aloneness as a state of dismantling the psychological burdens and habits of our anxiety-ridden times. Prodigious dreamers and lovers often spend their precious hours in the cafés.
To be aloof not isolated. Isolation is as fatal as cancer, it leads to dissipation and extinction. Aloofness is a skill of survival: a desire for feeling the nuances of aliveness. It is a form of alertness. To be alert to what the English Romantic poet John Keats calls “unheard of melodies.”
As I write this I am sitting inside a café where the vast summer light outside is kept off the room. Yet I feel just by sitting that I am floating in a pool of light. Maybe this lightness is the reward of momentarily abandoning the daily baggage—“the weariness, the fever, and the fret,” says Keats—of our post-modern life. Even the dim artificial lights inside the café that fall over the table and the floor are deceptively injected with a sense of detachment.
Tuscan cafés are decorated with this irrepressible feeling of lightness and detachment they always lie open to the foretaste of spring. You sit in one of these cafés and a slight tremor catches your heart for what is about to come, for what is about to be revealed. Something in the heart closes, something in the heart opens. A promise? What could not happen yesterday will finally happen today, tomorrow.
(photo from flickr)