sublime
The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#12Heads-up if you're thinking about clicking the credit/original source link at the bottom of the post...it's very NSFW and likely doesn't contain the original content.
Obviously I couldn't not to click after reading your comment. Somehow doubt the website contained the text:)
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#13Imagine posting this today: cite your sources, anecdotes are meaningless, n of 1, etc. It's interesting that "Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring." aligns with the recent post about caffeine boosting work capacity but no effect on creativity.
And with good reason! This piece, while beautifully written, claims that having black hair and liver spots means you have better tolerance for caffeine. I find that dubious, to say the least. When it comes to understanding the effects of drugs, we have learned through untold human suffering that the scientific approach is the best one we know of.
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#14Heads-up if you're thinking about clicking the credit/original source link at the bottom of the post...it's very NSFW and likely doesn't contain the original content.
Weird. Maybe it was misspelled?
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#15Some really interesting comments in the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647098
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#16Heads-up if you're thinking about clicking the credit/original source link at the bottom of the post...it's very NSFW and likely doesn't contain the original content.
Weird. Maybe it was misspelled?
archive.org shows that it seems like the domain registration seems to have expired and likely changed hands mid-decade or so.
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#17While writing La Comédie Humaine - 92 books and many more unfinished, from 1829 to 1850 - Balzac is said to have started his days around midnight. He would write till 8am, with some breaks for walks, rest for an hour, then write again till 4p. At that time he would bathe, receive friends for dinner, and go to bed at 6p or 7p. He drank a lot of coffee.
He had the dream job back in the 1800's
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#18Great writing of Mr Balzac about coffee. According to research he came out as a man of extremes - "Overweight, workaholic, and a caffeine abuser, Honoré de Balzac lived a life of excess. He prematurely died at the age of 51 owing to gangrene associated with congestive heart failure." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27638234
Not just extremes in what he swallowed: he’s notorious for “La Comédie Humaine” [0] his dozens of novels are actually set in the same fictional world, with consistent characters across decades. You can take excerpts from several books to tell a completely original story. It’s the most detailed world ever described —from individual thoughts to gruesome details about poverty, up to overarching consequences of the indus…
That sounds a lot like the basic idea behind Terry Pratchett's Discworld.
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#19Some really interesting comments in the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647098
That one's from 2017.
There's also 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921691
Re: The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
#20While writing La Comédie Humaine - 92 books and many more unfinished, from 1829 to 1850 - Balzac is said to have started his days around midnight. He would write till 8am, with some breaks for walks, rest for an hour, then write again till 4p. At that time he would bathe, receive friends for dinner, and go to bed at 6p or 7p. He drank a lot of coffee.
He had the dream job back in the 1800's
He's a fascinating figure - I recommend his biography by Zweig.
Regarding the "dream job", he was thoroughly jealous of aristocracy and their prestige and wealth and saw writing mostly as a way to accumulate similar wealth and join their ranks - which was impossible because writers didn't make that much and even if they did, the aristocracy would shun the nouveau-riche anyway. Interestingly, aristocracy was fascinated by his writing and wanted to rub elbows with him, which he completely missed (which is hilarious, given that he was a master of social observation) and so he spent all his earning on expensive furniture and such (which of course couldn't make any impression of the rich - they had the same trinkets, only better).
He also once hired a team of writers to write him book on a tight deadline. IIRC, the deadline was 48 hours and each writer was supposed to deliver a chapter of the novel, with little coordination of plot and characters. You can imagine the results...
Another interesting tidbit was that he spend multiple years wooing a bored Polish aristocrat, convincing her to abandon her husband and marry him instead. Of course, it was just another plot to get to the riches. There was also investing into silver mines in Corsica. He would make a great character in his novels...