Nostos : Fri Aug 23 2024
Odyssey Will Leave You Lonely
Dear Friends,
Am I harming you by offering you a coffeehouse? Several times I have seriously considered selling Odyssey precisely due to this fear.
The modern coffee shop is, after all, a business built on two addictions: caffeine (in the coffee) and sugar (in the pastries). I know, it is bad business for me to ask this aloud.
And it gets worse.
You might retort, “Joey, stop, it’s fine, because — as you assuredly know — a coffeehouse provides a critical social, nay spiritual, need: community, connection, a cure for loneliness. Plus, no one’s forcing anyone to order a double shot red eye or the sugariest pastry in the case.”
True, but it gets worse precisely regarding that sublime, spiritual need of community that a good coffeehouse can provide. Paradoxically, your encouraging retort smashed the final nail into the coffin of the coffeehouse’s unique purpose.
To wit: Odyssey Coffee cannot cure your loneliness. It can curate a place of refuge away from the external noise of the news and the flags and the nonsense. It can nurture a community of thinkers. It can be the place where old tense relationships are healed and new friendships are born.
In the end, though, the caffeine and the sugar and the vibes are distractions. Finite provisions for an infinite soul. Odyssey Coffee is entirely external while the most yearning and lonely part of you is internal.
Because I am neither God nor Infinite Beauty I will always leave you lonely. So will everyone else.
There, I said it.
Where do we go next, now that I’ve blown up my business plan right in front of my paying customers? On the one hand, I could sell Odyssey to someone who can carry on its mission without the cognitive dissonance that I feel. We’re not there — yet.
In the meantime, here is the next best thing. We can strike a kind of deal. I’ll keep giving you Odyssey as a thinking place away from the noise, while gently nudging you to read two books while you’re there: Symposium by Plato and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.
Get Christopher Gill’s translation of Symposium published by Penguin. Get Salvatore Sciurba’s critical edition & translation of The Practice by the Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications.
Better yet, skip the addictions (they’ll only frustrate you), stay at home (because Odyssey will be open tomorrow), and read this (it’s very short):
“Try to find time to stay alone with yourself: shut the door and settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say “I am now with myself,” and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone withourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion, and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards…when we are left without anything that stimulates us to think, speak, or act, we realize that there is very little in us that will prompt us to action in any direction at all…We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from outside.” (Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray, 1970, pp. 67—68)
Seaside refuge away from the noise. From in to out.
To that end we work,
Joey