From 'The Solitude of Cafes', Kęstutis Navakasl; initially written for a Lithuanian newspaper during the mid-1990s, when lyrical essays had a rebirth in the aftermath of independence.

Coffee is not a drink. Coffee is a ritual, one of our cosmopolitan features. In its gregarious meaning it is conversation, the eventual touching of fingers on the table's horizontal, the last gulp of fear before the conversation ends. An invitation to coffee is an invitation to a micro-model of Paris. It is the possibility that an awaited miracle will take place. You will go for coffee and read to each other for a long time, sharing the poets who've amazed you, or you will kiss until five in the morning with "Shocking Blue" on the stereo. After that, you will be surprised to feel fatally in love, yet the invitation to coffee will never come again.

This will mean that while, for the other person, half a cup was enough, you went and dove to the bottom, getting lost in the grounds. The coffee of solitude will remain, where we found you at the beginning of this essay.

To this cup, people come from different sides. From one side come those seeking a brief escape from telephones, wives, neighborhood girls, and dogs, from overstretched habits like bottomless bags. These are the reasons people go fishing, fix cars, and dig up gardens. They want to experience contraband, forbidden (in the home) solitude, solitude strengthened fourfold by all the colors and smells of their escape. That kind of person, with the last gulp of coffee in his mouth, is chased home by the clock, whose long directional arrows turn over his head. Without any special warning, his door shuts.

From the other side of the cup, the pure products of nature come to drink. Sumerians died out thousands of years ago; the Jotvingian swamps swallowed the armies of the Crusaders; and later on, the forms of civilization changed with ever-shorter intervals. Yet cuneiform writing, shouted from the primordial mouth, still pursues the solitary person in the street. Cities are not built for the lonely, and they wait for the city's reflections to turn over in the cup. The cup of coffee situates a person like that - his time and place of wandering become concrete. He can stop and look around.

"Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world," said Archimedes. The coffee cup is a place to stand, and the world really does begin to move, tearing off its anonymity like a pharaoh's mummy slowly unwound.....