and meter. To one beguiled by its charms, coffee was a kind of dialect
primeval, schooling the drinker in the parlance of the twin paradises,
Eden and Eternity.
Some years earlier Roy worked as a salesman for a specialty
coffee company which marketed “Cosmopolitan Coffee,” mass
produced concoctions said to impart the spirit of the Po or the
Danube or the Seine with every sip. Roy couldn’t agree more. Each
tasted to him like industrial poison. And while “A World in Your Cup”
was their slogan, he was convinced that a great coffee should be
anything but mundane. Hadn’t they seen the state of the world
lately?
Roy finally persuaded the executives to market a premium
whole-bean coffee, but it wasn’t long before they mucked that up too,
impregnating excellent beans with ridiculous, sickly flavors like
“Rocky Road” and “Raspberry Delight.” The way he came to see it,
one might as well add chocolate syrup to wine or a slice of mozzarella
to a cigar. It was another example of the impoverished abundance of
modern civilization, like all you can eat buffets and extended chase
scenes in action movies, where value-added was really value-
subtracted. He was set to abandon the industry altogether when a
want ad in the Los Angeles Times gave him a spark of hope. It read
only: COFFEELOSPHER WANTED.
A week later, after astounding the board with his knowledge of
coffee, he quit his old job and was awarded an executive position in
the promising new company. Deep as his romance with the bean was,
Roy rose quickly up the corporate ladder at big, booming and
bankrolled Biddenbrooks.
His gifted palate soon became the one of the company’s greatest
assets. Like the most experienced wine connoisseur, Roy could
distinguish different coffees by their alchemical argot. He could
identify geographic region, drying process, freshness, roasting
length, and purity of the mix. He believed that the secret of a good
coffee, perhaps of all good things, was its poetics: the proper
relationship of the parts to the whole, the whole to the parts. In the
way that every line of an exceptional poem might be a little poem
itself, reflecting aspects of the entire verse, each of the elements of a
coffee—its body, acidity, aroma and finish—should indicate not only
itself, but the absence of the other. Like a tangle of two lovers, this
was the geometry of desire.
In a world of divided things, Roy found this kind of prelapsarian
ABYSSINIA
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