And then of course, died young, no doubt partly because of that obsession. Look around the internet and you’ll find dozens of references to his drinking “50 cups of coffee per day,” or more conservative references to “20 to 40 cups per day.” His literary output, especially considering it was all handwritten, is absolutely insane, evidence of a person obsessed with one thing, and who dedicated almost all their waking hours (incidentally, usually from midnight to 8 or 9 a.m.) to their craft. The quantity of coffee he drank, however, is not as easy to nail down. The amount of writing he produced in his 51 years of life can be quantified: his masterpiece, La Comédie humaine, consists of 91 novels, stories, and essays, and he died before finishing the remaining 46 volumes he had planned. He worked 12- to 15-hour days, writing from midnight into the morning, sleeping in the evenings. I am one of those people whose coffee consumption habits often toe the line between “enthusiastic” and “problematic.”īut the print is really nice to have hanging on the cabinet above our coffee grinder, and the 5-pound bag of coffee beans that we manage to go through every month, with one person who drinks *one* strong 10-ounce pourover every day, and the other person being … me.īalzac, you could argue, is the patron saint of coffee-drinking writers, and his habits have become legend. Honestly, I might not have ever said that I was in the market for visual reminders of how wonderful coffee is. ![]() A few months back, my friend Anna sent us a print of a quote/paraphrasing from Honoré de Balzac’s essay “The Pleasure and Pains of Coffee”:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |