咖啡馆文化溯源 Coffeehouse Culture

     喜爱咖啡馆、爱喝咖啡的人大多是由于咖啡对于人体及思维的影响，而爱上这种饮品的。咖啡可以刺激交感神经，而与之相对，酒精则可以刺激本能反应。换句话说，酒精可以刺激我们的食欲、暴力欲、性欲、舞蹈欲、以及睡觉的欲望；而咖啡，则可以刺激我们去思考、谈话、阅读、写作抑或工作。酒精饮品总在大吃大喝时出现，而咖啡则很适合家中饮用。穆斯林信徒是世界上第一批咖啡饮用者，他们称咖啡为“太阳神的甘露”。由于咖啡可以促进人们思考、梦想、辩论，因此他们称：“咖啡是思想家和国际象棋大师的精神食粮。”在那时，他们以此回击基督教徒和异教徒对咖啡饮品的诽谤。

The customs of coffeehouse and café appear to be intimately connected to the effect of coffee and caffeine on mind and body background="../images_new/bg_hei.jpg". Coffee stimulates conscious mental associations, whereas alcohol, for instance, provokes instinctual responses. In other words, alcohol typically makes us want to eat, fight, make love, dance, and sleep, whereas coffee encourages us to think, talk, read, write, or work. Wine is consumed to relax, and coffee to drive home. For the Moslems, the world's first coffee drinkers, coffee was the "wine of Apollo," the beverage of thought, dream, and dialectic, "the milk of thinkers and chess players." For the faithful Moslem it was the answer to the Christian and pagan wine of Dionysus and ecstasy.

     无论是早先麦加的咖啡馆，还是现今的咖啡屋，消费者都更愿意在其中阅读、聊天，而非跳舞；更愿意下棋，而非赌博；更愿意安静地听音乐，而非唱歌。咖啡馆一般开在街边或露天，不像酒吧，总被黑暗所包围，远离理性世界。去喝咖啡的人并不需要什么地下避难所，而是需要一处能阅读报纸、谈天说地的舒适角落。

From the inception of the coffeehouse in Mecca to the present, customers in cafés tend to talk and read rather than dance, play chess rather than gamble, and listen contemplatively to music rather than sing. The café usually opens to the street and sun, unlike bars or saloons, whose dark interiors protect the drinker from the encroachment of the sober, workaday world. The coffee drinker wants not a subterranean refuge but a comfortable corner in which to read a newspaper and observe the world as it slips by, just beyond the edge of the table.

     咖啡馆时常与工作和非正式的学习息息相关。即使在最简陋的咖啡馆，埋头读书的消费者仍是里面的常见一景。土耳其人把他们的咖啡馆叫做“智慧学堂”（schools of the wise）。在17世纪的英国，咖啡馆被称作“一便士大学”（penny universities）。当时，进入咖啡馆，只需交1便士；咖啡的费用是2便士，包括报纸。人们可以参加不固定的论坛，并有可能遇到像Joseph Addison和Sir Richard Steele这样的名人。
The café is connected with work (the truck stop, the coffee break) and with a special brand of informal study. A customer buried in reading matter is a common sight in even the most lowbrow café. The Turks called their cafés "schools of the wise." In seventeenth-century England, coffeehouses were often called "penny universities." For the price of entry-one penny; coffee cost two, which included newspapers-one could participate in a floating seminar that might include such notables as Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele.

     事实上，在整个18、19世纪，除了露天派印象主义画家这种浪漫主义者不常在咖啡馆里以外，欧洲或美国的知识分子都会把一天中最美好的时光泡在咖啡馆中。启蒙主义不仅给欧洲带来了新的世界观，也为欧洲带来了咖啡和茶。在早晨喝完咖啡后宣传革新思想，总是比吃完典型的老式啤酒加青鱼的早餐后容易得多。

As a matter of fact, aside from the Romanticists, who temporarily switched to plein-air, it is hard to find too many European or American intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who did not spend the better part of their days in cafés or coffeehouses. Recall that the Enlightenment not only gave Europe a new world view, but coffee and tea as well. It must have been considerably easier revolutionizing Western thought after morning coffee than after the typical medieval breakfast of beer and herring.

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