Coffee in TRP

[Mark Kohut]

I still get self-struck with TRP finding this real thing trope within Western History and 
using it so subtlely in his resonant "ambiguous" way.
This week was Coffee Week or something close and the media did features and history. 
Evidently Jerry Seinfeld said on NPR (about it): "We all need something to get us started."
Is the increased speeding up coffeee gives us another early example of incipient modernity in TRP's vision?
Is it a symbolic trope for moving Western Culture to the coffeehouse, i.e. street? 
 
And I found this. In a book about finding meaning in a secular age called All Things Shining (I think),
the authors devote four pages to coffee as THE SECULAR ritual of a secular age: 
 
"They argue for the calmer joys of craftsmanship. They take us through five pages on the sacred craft of the wheelwright and then through four pages of the “revered domain” of making the proper cup of coffee—the sacred beans, the sacred cup lovingly tended, the company worthy to share this holy communion. The liturgy takes patient experiment and rapt devotion:
If it is the warmth of the coffee on a winter’s day that you like, then drinking it in a cozy corner of the house, perhaps by a fire with a blanket, in a cup that transmits the warmth to your hands might well help to bring out the best in this ritual. If it is the striking black color of the coffee that attracts your eye and enhances the aroma, then perhaps a cup with a shiny white ceramic interior will bring this out. But there is no single answer to the question of what makes the ritual appealing, and it takes experimentation and observation, with its risks and rewards, to discover the meaningful distinctions yourself. 
This experimentation with and observation of the coffee ultimately develops in you the skill for seeing the relevant features of the ritual and ultimately develops the skills for bringing them out at their best. These skills are manifold: the skill for knowing how to pick exactly the right coffee, exactly the right cup, exactly the right place to drink it, and to cultivate exactly the right companions to drink it with. When one has learned these skills and cultivated one’s environment so that it is precisely suited to them, then one has a ritual rather than a routine, a meaningful celebration of oneself and of one’s environment rather than a generic and meaningless performance of a function. "
> 
>The reviewer, Garry Wills in the NYR of Books cannot take this, nor the book therefore, seriously. 
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