Why I Love Cafés

"I go to the coffee house to escape myself".

Thomas Bernard once observed that going to a café presented a kind of escape from daily life. As he put it, “I go to the coffee house to escape myself.”

Likewise, in the painting above, by Édouard Manet (1887), we see a young man sitting in a café by himself writing in a notebook. He’s very elegantly dressed, and looks up from the page to look straight at the viewer. It’s a gentle depiction of the special café atmosphere, and how writing in a journal can be an act of self-exploration. As Flaubert put it, “the art of writing is the art of discovering what you truly believe.”

From an artistic perspective this painting also represents Manet’s growing interest in depicting cafés and the young people he encountered in them. In 1887 he was 40 years old, at the pinnacle of his career, and likely would have looked with both fondness and sympathy at younger creatives still making a name for themselves. Indeed, the man in this portrait is anonymous.

Another sketch by Manet (1878) shows the Irish writer George Moore, sitting at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, a popular spot for artists and writers.

These café paintings are loving portraits of the artistic souls who inhabited them. But perhaps my favorite sketch is the one below, simply titled “Au Café” (1869). It depicts the café as a lively place where friends come to drink and discuss.

It’s a reminder that we need such places in our life, where we can “escape ourselves”. A good café is like a second home, a space of intellectual and artistic kinship. It’s the ideal place to read and write, to meet old friends and make new ones. But above all, it’s a place where you can disappear for a while, and be completely yourself.

I love cafés, and I hope you do too.

Julian

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